Despite the myriad pathways to initial access on our networks, phishing remains the single most popular technique for attackers. The open nature of email and our reliance on it for communication make it difficult for defenders to classify messages, so it is no surprise that suspicious email investigation is a top use case for automation. Today, we are releasing a new community playbook for Splunk SOAR (previously Splunk Phantom) to help enrich suspicious email events.

Vulnerabilities are weaknesses in the security infrastructure that bad actors can exploit to gain unauthorized access to a private network. It is nearly impossible for security analysts to patch 100% of the vulnerabilities identified on any given day, but a vulnerability management plan can ensure that the highest risk vulnerabilities (those that are most likely to cause a data breach), will be addressed immediately.

Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) tools are most commonly known for automating manual security operations processes in order to expedite security investigations or cyber response. For instance, Splunk’s SOAR technology, Splunk Phantom, is most commonly used to automate alert triage, phishing investigation and response, threat hunting and vulnerability management.

In January and February of 2021, the threat actor called Hafnium used a number of post-exploitation tools after gaining access to Exchange servers through a zero-day exploit. One of their persistence methods was creating new user accounts in the domain, giving them the ability to log back into the network using normal authentication rather than use a web shell or continue to re-exploit the vulnerability (which has since been patched).

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you've probably come across the recent Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities and its associated exploits.Stop!!! The first thing you should do is to go and patch any Exchange servers you may be running, then you can come back and finish reading this blog. Microsoft's blog provides links to various tools to help in this regard.

Every security team should utilize security frameworks in their strategy and tactics to help reduce risk from common cybersecurity threats. Security frameworks guide organizations on how they should develop, build, and maintain their IT security policies and procedures while sharing best practices for meeting compliance requirements. Healthcare operations in particular are often presented with increasing regulatory scrutiny and obligations that must be met in order to be competitive.