Introduction
High-profile breaches are becoming a daily occurrence in any organization, especially with the rise of digital technology. Luckily, even though attacks are becoming more complicated, platforms to fight said threats are also stepping up their game. Take a comprehensive approach to your security defense across the enterprise by implementing Splunk through a six-stage security journey.
First, Splunk can help you solve security challenges associated with incident investigation and forensics, security monitoring, advanced threat detection, SOC automation, incident response, and compliance, fraud and analytics detection, and insider threats.
But how?
Through a 6-stage Analytics-Driven Security Journey
Incident Investigation and Forensics incidents can occur without warning and go undetected for extended periods. In fact, by the time these attacks have been detected, the damage may already be done. Splunk helps you be proactive by detecting threats faster through better security investigations.
Security Monitoring lets you look through many data sources to identify security threats, including cloud devices, data center systems, and applications.
Advanced Threat Detection works against Advanced Persistent Threats by correlating data to track advanced threats. Splunk ES (Enterprise Security) and UBA (User Behavior Analytics) are the primary sources to apply a kill chain methodology through analysis to detect even the beginnings of threats.
SOC Automation works to scale operations, accelerate response, and amend any security issues that may occur. Splunk solutions will help you implement security practices and even foster collaboration across team members.
Incidence Response works by monitoring security events to take proactive steps against even the most minor threats that may occur. Incident Response teams defend your security structure when threats are detected.
Compliance is essential in any security structure. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) guidelines, HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability) compliance issues, PCI, SOX, and other guidelines need to be considered. Splunk will create rules and reports to identify threats to data.
Fraud Analytics and Detection works through machine data. Splunk can implement machine data to improve fraud teams’ detection and investigation of anomalies. This is how Splunk can protect against financial losses, protect your company’s reputation, and maintain organizational efficiencies.
Insider Threat Detection investigates current or former employees, contractors, partners, or people affiliated with your organization’s activities to determine any intentional or accidental data misuse. Splunk will help security teams prioritize insider threats that may not have been discovered.
The First Stage – Collection
Where can you begin other than obtaining raw materials?
Stage 1 focuses on helping you provide a solid base so that you can establish a deep understanding of your environment to make the best defense strategy decisions. The best practice for data collection is to capture machine data generated by networks such as Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks, track endpoint logs to give insight into malicious activities such as malware attacks, authenticate logs to tell you where and when users are accessing applications, and monitor web activity.
The Second Stage – Normalization
Normalization means you are ensuring your data is compliant with security taxonomy. This means you guarantee that fields representing values such as IP addresses or usernames have common names regardless of the device that created the event.
Why is this step necessary? Normalizing data ensures you have a wider variety of detection mechanisms, the ability to scale your security team’s capabilities, and start tracking systems and users on your network.
How do you measure data normalization?
By stage 2, data should be mapped appropriately and compliant with the Common Information Model. Search performance will be done through data models associated with the Common Information Model, and finally, asset and user details will be correlated to events in your security log platform.
The Third Stage – Expansion
The third stage will drive advanced attack detection by collecting additional data sources like endpoint activity and network metadata.
Network sources for collecting metadata include Splunk Stream, DMS query-level data, and DHCP activity. Endpoints capture process creation, file changes, registry modifications, and network connections to provide a clear history of any critical events that may occur. Sources for endpoints include Sysmon, osqury, and Carbon Black Defense.
During the expansion stage, you must watch out for the context of detailed attacks. You may collect detail-rich data that is unreadable to you, so you miss vital details of attacks.
The Fourth Stage – Enrichment
Enrichment is augmenting security data with intelligence sources to understand an event’s context and impact. This is most used in incident investigation and response. Data sources for this stage include local IP/URL block lists, open-source threat intelligence feeds, and commercial threat intelligence feeds.
How do you measure enrichment?
Milestones for this stage ensure that security personnel can understand the urgency of an alert, augment alerts by matching them against previous threats, and gather context around threats.
During this stage, your team should have significant detection capabilities, but sometimes requests are not tracked, performance could be more measured, and collaboration may not be optimal.
The Fifth Stage – Automation & Orchestration.
The fifth stage establishes operation abilities that are consistent and repeatable—automation and orchestration help most with incident investigation and response, security monitoring, and SOC automation.
By leveraging a SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) solution, you can significantly reduce risk, strengthening your defenses by integrating existing security tools and threat intelligence sources. The more mature your security defenses are, the more you can triage alerts and gain a better consistency of how your security team is behaving.
In the fifth stage, you should be able to track incidents, measure analyst effectiveness, and automate simple response actions. Beware of backlogs of security threats in this stage- complicated data may be too broad to detect minute threats, and these threats might strengthen as they go on.
The Sixth Stage – Advanced Detection
The sixth stage applies advanced detection mechanisms such as machine learning to analyze users, endpoint devices, and applications to fight more robustly against unknown threats, even when they leave only subtle traces. During this stage, you can use the most advanced techniques available to identify unknown threats and even use new detection mechanisms as they become available.
It should be smooth sailing once you have gone through the six stages of your security journey.
Threats will always exist, but fighting back is the hard part. Keep updated with security and put yourself in the best position to detect and prevent the most complicated attacks.
Conclusion
Step up your security with this simple 6-step security journey, starting with Splunk. Sometimes, stepping towards that steep incline can be challenging, so feel free to go with others. Contact Prudent right now, to learn how you can begin to improve your security and keep out unwanted visitors!