How to Filter Out Events at the Indexer by Date in Splunk

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By: Jon Walthour | Splunk Consultant

 

A customer presented me with the following problem recently. He needed to be able to exclude events older than a specified time from being indexed in Splunk. His requirement was more precise than excluding events older than so many days ago. He was also dealing with streaming data coming in through an HTTP Event Collector (HEC). So, his data was not file-based, where an “ignoreOlderThan” setting in an inputs.conf file on a forwarder would solve his problem.

As I thought about his problem, I agreed with him—using “ignoreOlderThan” was not an option. Besides, this would work only based on the modification timestamp of a monitored file, not on the events themselves within that file. The solution to his problem needed to be more granular, more precise.

We needed a way to exclude events from being indexed into Splunk through whatever means they were arriving at the parsing layer (from a universal forwarder, via syslog or HEC) based on a precise definition of a time. This meant that it had to be more exact than a certain number of days ago (as in, for example, the “MAX_DAYS_AGO” setting in props.conf).

To meet his regulatory requirements for retention, my customer needed to be able to exclude, for example, events older than January 1 at midnight and do so with certainty.

As I set about finding (or creating) a solution, I found “INGEST_EVAL,” a setting in transforms.conf. This setting was introduced in version 7.2. It runs an eval expression at index-time on the parsing (indexing) tier in a similar (though not identical) way as a search-time eval expression works. The biggest difference with this new eval statement is that it is run in the indexing pipeline and any new fields created by it become indexed fields rather than search-time fields. These fields are stored in the rawdata journal of the index.

However, what if I could do an “if-then” type of statement in an eval that would change the value of a current field? What if I could evaluate the timestamp of the event, determine if it’s older than a given epoch date and change the queue the event was in from the indexing queue (“indexQueue”) to oblivion (“nullQueue”)?

I found some examples of this in Splunk’s documentation, but none of them worked for this specific use case. I also found that “INGEST_EVAL” is rather limited in what functions it can work with the eval statement. Functions like “relative_time()” and “now()” don’t work. I also found that, at the point in the ingestion pipeline where Splunk runs these INGEST_EVAL statements, fields like “_indextime” aren’t yet defined. This left me with using an older “time()” function. So, when you’re working with this feature in the future, be sure to test your eval expression carefully as not all functions have been fully evaluated in the documentation yet.

 

Here’s what I came up with:

props.conf

[<sourcetype>]

TRANSFORMS-oldevents=delete-older-than-January-1-2020-midnight-GMT

transforms.conf

[delete-older-than-January-1-2020-midnight-GMT]

INGEST_EVAL = queue=if(substr(tostring(1577836800-_time),1,1)=”-“, “indexQueue”, “nullQueue”)

 

The key is in the evaluation of the first character of the subtraction in the “queue=” calculation. A negative number yields a “-” for the first character; a positive number a digit. Generally, negative numbers are “younger than” your criteria and positive numbers are “older than” it. You keep the younger events by sending them to the indexQueue (by setting “queue” equal to “indexQueue”) and you chuck older events by sending them to the nullQueue (by setting “queue” equal to “nullQueue”).

Needless to say, my customer was pleased with the solution we provided. It addressed his use case “precisely.” I hope it is helpful for you, too. Happy Splunking!

Have a unique use case you would like our Splunk experts to help you with? Contact us today!

Effective Use of Splunk and AWS in the Time of Coronavirus

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By: Bruce Johnson | Director, Enterprise Security

Firstly, be safe and be well. The TekStream family has found itself pulling together in ways that transcend remote conference calls and we hope that your respective organizations are able to do the same. We feel very privileged to be in the Splunk ecosystem as uses for Splunk technology are becoming ever more immediate.

To that end, we have seen all of our customers putting emphasis on monitoring remote access. Was any company sizing their network for virtualizing their entire ecosystem overnight? Network access points were sized for pre-determined traffic profiles leveraging pre-determined bandwidth levels for remote access. Those network appliances were configured to support predictable traffic volumes from occasionally remote workers, they weren’t designed to support 100% of all internal access traffic. The impact to operational monitoring of services supporting remote users became the most critical part of your infrastructure overnight.

Likewise, what you were monitoring for security just got hidden in a cloud of chaff. The changes to network traffic have opened you up to new threats that demand immediate attention.

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Security Impact

There are several new areas of concern in the context of the current climate:

Your threat surface has changed

Anomalies relative to RDP sessions or escalation of privileges for remotely logged in users used to be a smaller percentage of traffic and might have figured into evaluating potential threat risk. Obviously that is no longer the case. If you’re able to segregate traffic for access to critical systems from traffic that simply needs to be routed or tunneled to other public cloud-provided applications, that would help cut down on the traffic that needs to be monitored but that will require changes to network monitoring and Splunk searches.

Your policies and processes need to be reviewed and revised

Have you published security standards for home networks for remote workers? Do you have policies relative to working in public networks? Do you have adequate personal firewalls in place or standard implementations for users wanting to implement security add-ons for their home networks or work-provided laptops?

Some employees might now be faced with working on home networks which are not adequate to the bandwidth needs of video conferencing and may opt to work from shared public access points (although they might have to make due with working from the Starbucks parking lot as internal access is prohibited). Many do not have secure wireless access points or firewalls on their home networks. Publishing links to your employees on how to implement additional wi-fi security and/or products that are supported for additional security, as well as how to ensure access to critical systems through supported VPN/MFA methods is worth doing even if you have done it before. There is also the potential expansion of access to include personal devices in addition to company-owned devices. They will need to have the same level of security, and you will also need to consider the privacy implications of employee-owned devices connecting to your business network.

Likewise, help desk resources in support of these efforts as well as level1 security analysts monitoring this type of activity might need to be shifted or expanded.

New threats have emerged

Hackers don’t take the day off because they have to work from home and there are several creative threats that take advantage of Coronavirus panic. Hackers are nothing if not nimble. There are several well-publicized attacks which seek to take advantage of users anxious for more information on the progress of the pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have publicly warned about impersonators. Thousands of domains are getting registered every day in support of Coronavirus related phishing attacks. Some of them are even targeting hospitals, which takes “unethical” hacking to a brand new low. Additionally, there are new threat lists to consider, for example, RiskIQ is publishing a list of rapidly expanding domains relative to coronavirus.

Stepping up the normal Splunk monitoring for those domains, moving up plans to augment email filtering, setting up a mailbox that Splunk ingests for reported attacks that can be easily forwarded from end-users that suspect a phishing email, or augmenting your Phantom SOAR implementation to highlight automated response to specific phishing attacks are all appropriate in that context.

Operational impact

 

VPN Monitoring

If you are not currently monitoring VPN usage in Splunk it is relatively straightforward to implement VPN/Firewall data sources and to begin monitoring utilization and health from those appliances. It is useful to monitor network traffic as a whole relative to VPN bandwidth as well as the normal CPU/memory metrics coming from those appliances directly.

If you’re already monitoring VPN traffic and likely you are if you have Splunk, at the very least, you need to alter your thresholds for what constitutes an alert or an anomaly.

The following are examples of dashboards we’ve built to monitor VPN related firewall traffic as well as cpu/memory:

In addition to straightforward monitoring of the environment, expect troubleshooting tickets to increase. Detailed metrics relative to the connectivity errors might need to be monitored more closely or events might be expanded to make troubleshooting more efficient. Below is an example of Palo Alto Splunk dashboards that track VPN errors:

There are several out of the box applications from Splunk for VPN / NGFW sources including but not limited to:

Palo Alto: Includes firewall data that monitors bandwidth across key links. Additionally, Global protect VPN monitoring can help customers with troubleshooting remote access. https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/491/

Zscaler: Provides visibility into remote access, no matter where the users are connecting from.https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/3866/

Cisco: Provides equivalent functionality to populate dashboards around remote access and bandwidth on key links.  https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/1620/

Fortinet: Provides ability to ingest Fortigate Fortinet traffic  https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/2846/

Nagios: Monitors the network for problems caused by overloaded data links or network connections, also monitors routers, switches and more. https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/2703/

One of the techniques to consider in response to this spike in volume is to split network traffic on your VPNs to segregate priority or sensitive traffic from traffic that you can pass through to external applications.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3532440/coronavirus-challenges-remote-networking.html

Split tunneling can be used to route traffic and it’s being recommended by Microsoft for O365 access. This also effects how VPN traffic and threats are monitored through established tunnels. Obviously, the traffic to internal critical infrastructure and applications would be the priority and all externally routed traffic could be, if not ignored, at least de-prioritized.

Additionally, MFA applications fall into much the same category as monitoring of VPN sources and the same types of use cases apply to monitoring those sources. Below are a subset of relevant application links.

RSA Multifactor Authentication: https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/2958/

Duo Multifactor Authentication: https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/3504/

Okta Multifactor Authentication: https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/2806/

 

If you’re familiar with Splunk, you already know that it is typically only a few hours of effort to onboard a new data source and begin leveraging it in the context of searches, dashboards, and alerts.

Engaged Workers

There are some people that are focused in an office environment, then there are the people that work at home with one cup of coffee that can fuel them until they are dragged away from their laptop, then there are the people that have way to much to do around the house to bother with work. It’s nice to know whether people are actually plugged in. A whole new demand for monitoring remote productivity fueling new solution offerings from Splunk. They have developed a set of dashboards under the guise of Remote Work Insights.

Of course, monitoring your VPN and conferencing software is just the beginning and there are a plethora of sources that might be monitored to measure productivity. Often those sources vary by team and responsibilities. The power inherent in Splunk is that each team can be monitored individuality with different measures and aggregated into composite team views at multiple levels, similar to ITSI monitoring of infrastructure layers and components. We are finding a great deal of opportunity in this area and it is expected to be a set of techniques and solutions that will persist well beyond the shared immediate challenges of Coronavirus.

A related use case for VPN monitoring is to track login and logout to confirm that people are actually logging in rather than social distancing on the golf course, but this use case has been less common in practice.

Migrate VPN services to the cloud

Ultimately, when faced with dynamic scaling and provisioning problems, the cloud is your answer. If your VPN infrastructure is taxed, the traffic is now completely unpredictable, and there is no way to scale up your network appliances in the short term, consider moving VPN services to cloud connectivity points. You can move network security to the cloud and consume it just like any other SaaS application. This has the advantage of being instantly scalable up and down (once normal operations resume) as well as being secure. Implementation can be done in parallel to your existing VPN network-based solutions. Virtualizing VPN in AWS is relatively straightforward and it’s certainly something TekStream can help you to accomplish in short order. It has the advantage of scaling and doing so temporarily. There are a variety of options to consider.

AWS Marketplace has VPN appliances you can deploy immediately. This is a good approach if you are already using a commercial-grade VPN like a Cisco ASA or Palo Alto. This will have the least impact on existing users since they can continue to use the same client, just point their connection to a new hostname or IP but it can be a bit pricey.  Some examples of commercial options from the AWS Marketplace are:

Cisco ASA: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00WH2LGM0

Barracuda Firewall: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B077G9FKK7

Juniper Networks: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B01LYWCGDX

 

You can use AWS’s managed VPN service. This is a great “middle of the road” compromise if you don’t currently have a VPN.  As a managed service AWS handles a lot of the nuts and bolts and you can get up and connected quickly.  Your users will connect to the AWS VPN which connects to your AWS VPC, (which is connected to your datacenter, network, on-prem resources, etc). As a fully managed client-based VPN you can manage and monitor all your connections from a single console.  AWS VPN is an elastic solution that leverages the cloud to automatically scale based on user demand, without the limitations of a hardware appliance.  It may also allow you to take advantage of additional AWS provided security mechanisms like rotating keys, credentialing, etc. to augment your security practices.

Finally, if you need something quick and have a smaller number of users, you can deploy your own VPN software on an Ec2 instance and “roll-your-own.” While this can be quick and dirty, this can be error-prone, less secure, and introduce a single point of failure, and it has to be manually managed.

Additional Services

There are a whole host of ancillary supporting services which can might need to be expanded for inclusion into Splunk such as Citrix, Webex, Skype, VoiP infrastructure, Teams, etc.. Below is an example of an Australian customer monitoring Video conferencing solutions with Splunk ITSI, but TekStream has been involved to build out monitoring of critical VoiP infrastructure and relate that to multi-channel support mechanisms including web and chat traffic. The point is that all of these channels might have just become critical infrastructure.

Conclusion

Much of the above recommendations can be accomplished in days or weeks. If there is an urgent need to temporarily expand your license to respond to the Coronavirus threat, that might be possible in the short term as well. With uncertainty around the duration of the pandemic, it would seem to warrant an all-out response from infrastructure, to processes and procedures, to operations, and security.

Your business can’t afford to fail. TekStream is here to help if you need us.

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The Power of Splunk On-The-Go with Splunk Mobile and Splunk Cloud Gateway

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By: Pete Chen | Splunk Practice Team Lead

 

Splunk can be a powerful tool in cybersecurity, infrastructure monitoring, and forensic investigations. While it’s great to use in the office, after-hour incidents require the ability to have data available immediately. Since most people carry a mobile device, such as a cell phone or a tablet, it’s easy to see how having dashboards and alerts on a mobile device can help bridge the information gap.

Splunk Mobile brings the power of Splunk dashboards to mobile devices, powered by Splunk Cloud Gateway. While Splunk Mobile is installed on a mobile device, Splunk Cloud Gateway feeds the mobile app from Splunk Enterprise. Between the two applications is Splunk’s AWS-hosted Cloud Bridge. Traffic between Splunk Enterprise and the mobile device is protected by TLS 1.2 encryption.

Architecture from Splunk

Splunk Cloud Gateway

Software Download https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/4250/
Documentation https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Gateway

Splunk Cloud Gateway is a standard app found on Splunkbase (link above). It can be installed through the User Interface (UI), or by unpacking the file to <SPLUNK_HOME>/etc/apps/. When installed through the UI, Splunk will prompt for a restart once installation is complete. Otherwise, restart Splunk once the installation package has been unpacked into the Apps folder.

After restart, Splunk Cloud Gateway will appear as an app on Splunk Web. Browse to the app, and these are the pages available in the app:

The first page allows for devices to be manually registered. When Splunk Mobile is opened for the first time (or on a device not registered to another Splunk Cloud Gateway instance), an activation code will appear at the center of the display. That code can be used to register the device on Splunk. The “Device Name” field can be any value, used to identify that particular device. It’s helpful to identify the main user of the device and the type of device.

Skipping over Devices until a device is registered, and putting aside Splunk > AR for another time, the next important section is the “Configure” tab. At the top of the page, all the deployment configurations are listed. The Cloud Gateway ID can be modified through a configuration file to better reflect the environment. A configuration file can be downloaded for a Mobile Device Manager (MDM). This is also where the various products associated with Splunk Connected Experiences can be enabled.

In the Application section, look for Splunk Mobile. Under the Action column, click on Enable. This must be done before a device can be registered.

The App Selection Tab is where apps can be selected, based on each user’s preference, to determine which dashboards are visible through Splunk Mobile. When no apps are selected, all available dashboards are displayed. Select the apps desired by clicking them from the left panel, and they will appear on the right panel. Be sure to click save to commit the changes.

A couple of things to point out in this section.

  • Again, if an app is not selected, all available dashboards to the user will appear on Splunk Mobile.
  • Management of apps is based on the user, not centrally managed. During the registration of a device, a user must log in to authenticate. The apps selected in this page will be the same for all devices registered under this user.
  • Even if apps are specified, all dashboards set with global permissions will still be visible to the user.
  • To eliminate all dashboards and control what is viewable requires setting all dashboards to app-only permissions, and creating a generic app without dashboards. When this app is selected, and after all dashboards are converted to app-only permissions, no dashboards will appear.

The final tab is the dashboard for Splunk Cloud Gateway. This dashboard shows the status of the app, and provides metrics of usage. The top three panels may be the most important when first installing Cloud Gateway. If the service doesn’t seem to be working correctly, these three panels will help in troubleshooting the service.

 

Splunk Mobile

Google Play Store https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.splunk.android.alerts
Apple App Store https://apps.apple.com/us/app/splunk-mobile/id1420299852

Installing Splunk Mobile on a mobile device is as simple as going to the app store, and having the device set up the app. Once the app is ready, launching the app will bring up a registration page. On this page, there is a code needed to register the device with Splunk Cloud Gateway. Below is a secondary code. This is used to verify with Cloud Gateway, making sure the device is registered with the correct encryption key.

With the code above, return to Splunk Cloud Gateway, and register the device. Type in the activation code from Splunk Mobile. Enter in a device name, as explained above. Click on “Register” to continue.

Validate the confirmation code displayed in the UI with the code displayed on the device. If the codes don’t match, stop the registration process. If the codes do match, enter credentials for Splunk, and click “Continue”.

At this point, the device is registered with Splunk Cloud Gateway. Validate the device name in the Registered Devices page. Make sure the Device Type, and the Owner matches the device and user. If necessary, “Remove” is available to remove a device from Cloud Gateway.

From a mobile perspective, the initial page displayed is the list of potential alerts.

At the bottom of the screen, tap on “Dashboards” to see the list of dashboards available to the mobile device. Without any additional configuration, all available Splunk dashboards should appear in the list. Click on any dashboard.

As an example, when the Cloud Gateway Status Dashboard is selected, the dashboard opens and allows for a time-selector at the top of the page. The panels available from the UI are displayed in a single column on the mobile device.

Points to Consider

Now that Splunk Mobile and Splunk Cloud Gateway are configured, and ready to be used, here are some points to consider in an Enterprise deployment.

  • When installing on a search head cluster, Splunk Cloud Gateway must be installed on the cluster captain. The captain runs some of the scripts necessary to connect Cloud Gateway to the Spacebridge.
  • All dashboards set with global permissions will appear. To limit visibility, set dashboard permissions to app-only or private.
  • During device registration, the credentials used will determine the dashboards and alerts available to the device. Configuration is user-based, not centrally controlled.
  • Trellis is not a supported feature of Splunk Mobile. Dashboards with panels using trellis will need to be reconfigured.
  • Panel sizing and scaling is not adjustable at this time. Some dashboard re-design may be necessary to tell the best story.
  • Pay special attention to how long dashboards take to load. From a mobile perspective, dashboards will need to load faster for the mobile user.

Want to learn more about Splunk Mobile and Splunk Cloud Gateway? Contact us today!

Connecting Splunk to Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)

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By: Pete Chen | Splunk Team Lead

Overview

Splunk installation is complete. Forwarders are sending data to the indexers, search heads successfully searching the indexers. The next major step is to add central authentication to Splunk. Simply put, you log into your computer, your email, and your corporate assets with a username and password. Add Splunk to the list of tools available to you with those credentials. This also saves the time and hassle of creating user profiles for everyone who needs access to Splunk. Before embarking on this step, it’s important to develop a strategy for permissions and rights. This should answer the question, “who has access to what information?”

LDAP Basics

LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. The most popular LDAP used by businesses is Microsoft’s Active Directory. The first step in working with LDAP is to determine the “base DN”. This is the name of the domain. Let’s use the domain “splunkrocks.local” as an example. In LDAP terms, it can be expressed as dc=splunkrocks,dc=local. Inside of the DN are the organizational units, OU’s. So an example of an organizational unit expressed is ou=users,dc=splunkrocks,dc=local.

Most technical services require some sort of authentication to access the information they provide. The credentials (username and password) needed to access the LDAP server is called the “BindDN”. When a connection is requested, the AD server will require a user with enough permissions to allow user and group information to be shared. In most business environments, the group managing Splunk will not be the same group managing the LDAP server. It’s best to ask for an LDAP administrator to type in the credentials during the setup process. The LDAP password is masked while it’s being typed and is hashed in the configuration file.

Keep in mind that connecting Splunk to the LDAP server doesn’t complete the task. It’s necessary to map LDAP groups to Splunk roles afterward.

Terms

LDAP: Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

AD: Active Directory

DN: Distinguished Name

DC: Domain Component

CN: Common Name

OU: Organizational Unit

SN: Surname

Sample Directory Structure

Using our sample domain, Splunkrocks Local Domain (splunkrocks.local), let’s assume an organizational unit for Splunk is created called “splunk”. Inside this OU, there are two sub-organizational units, one for users, one for groups. In Splunk terms, these are users and roles.

 

Group Users Users SN
User Austin Carson austin.carson
User Kim Gordon kim.gordon
User James Lawrence james.lawrence
User Wendy Moore wendy.moore
User Brad Hect brad.hect
User Tom Chu tom.chu
Power User Bruce Lin bruce.lin
Power User Catherine Lowe catherine.lowe
Power User Jeff Marlow jeff.marlow
Power User Heather Bradford heather.bradford
Power User Ben Baker ben.baker
Admin Bill Chang bill.chang
Admin Charles Smith charles.smith
Admin Candice Owens candice.owens
Admin Jennifer Cohen jennifer.cohen

Connecting Splunk to LDAP

From the main menu, go to Settings, and select Access Control.

Select Authentication Method

Select LDAP under External Authentication. Then click on Configure Splunk to use LDAP

 

In the LDAP Strategies page, there should not be any entries listed. At the top right corner of the page, click on New LDAP to add the Splunkrocks AD server as an LDAP source. Give the new LDAP connection a name.

The first section to configure is the LDAP Connection Settings. This section defines the LDAP server, the connection port, whether the connection is secure, and a user with permission to bind the Splunk server to the LDAP server.

The second section determines how Splunk finds the users within the AD server.

–        User base DN: Provide the path where Splunk can find the users in on the AD server.

–        User base filter: This can help reduce the number of users brought back into Splunk.

–        User name attribute: This is the attribute within the AD Server which contains the username. In most AD servers, this is “sAMAccountName”.

–        Real name attribute: This is the human-readable name. This is where “Ben Baker” is displayed” instead of “ben.baker”. In most AD servers, this is the “cn”, or Common Name.

–        Email attribute: this is the attribute in AD which contains the user’s email.

–        Group mapping attribute: If the LDAP server uses a group identifier for the users, this will be needed. It’s not required if distinguished names are used in the LDAP groups.

The second section determines how Splunk finds the groups within the AD server.

–        Group base DN: Provide the path where Splunk can find the groups in on the AD server.

–        Static group search filter: search filter to retrieve static groups.

–        Group name attribute: This is the attribute within the AD server which contains the group names. In most AD servers, this is simply “cn”, or Common Name.

–        Static member attribute: The group attribute with the group’s members contained. This is usually “member”.

The rest can be left blank for now. Click Save to continue. If all the settings are entered properly, the connection will be successful. A restart of Splunk will be necessary to enable the newly configured authentication method.  Remember, adding LDAP authentication is the first part of the process. To complete the setup, it’s also necessary to map Splunk roles to LDAP groups. Using the access and rights strategy mentioned above, create the necessary Splunk roles and LDAP groups. Then map the roles to the groups, and assign the necessary group or groups to each user. Developing this strategy and customizing roles is something we can help you do, based on your needs and best practices.

Want to learn more about connecting Splunk to LDAP? Contact us today!

You Can Stop Data Breaches Before They Start​

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You would think that, given the ruinous financial and reputational consequences of data breaches, companies would take them seriously and do everything possible to prevent them. But, in many cases, you would be wrong.

The global cost of cybercrime is expected to exceed $2 trillion in 2019, according to Juniper Research’s The Future of Cybercrime & Security: Financial and Corporate Threats & Mitigation report. This is a four-fold increase when compared to the estimated cost of cybercrime just four years ago, in 2015.

While the average cost of a data breach is in the millions and malicious attacks are on the rise, 73 percent of businesses aren’t ready to respond to a cyber attack, according to the 2018 Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report. The study of more than 4,000 organizations across the US, UK, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands found that most organizations are unprepared and would be seriously impacted by an attack.

Why are organizations unprepared to deal successfully with such breaches? One potential issue is the toll working in cybersecurity takes on both CISOs and IT security professionals. One report indicates that two-thirds of those professionals are burned out and thinking about quitting their jobs. This is bad news when some 3 million cybersecurity jobs already are going unfilled, leaving companies vulnerable to data breaches.

In the executive suite, CISOs recently surveyed by ESG and the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) said their reasons for leaving an organization after a brief tenure (18 to 24 months) include corporate cultures that don’t always emphasize cybersecurity and budgets that aren’t adequate for an organization’s size or industry.

We’d add one other factor: companies are often afraid to try new technology that can solve the problem.

Given the ongoing nature and potential negative impact of data breaches, all those factors need to change. Why put an organization, employees and clients under stress and at risk when there are solutions to not just managing, but eliminating data breaches?

Our clients have had particular success in identifying and stopping data breaches by using Splunk on AWS, which together offer a secure cloud-based platform and powerful event monitoring software. We are big believers in the combination, and we think that CISOs who are serious about security should be investigating their use. AWS dominates the cloud market and Splunk has spent six years as a Leader in the Gartner Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Magic Quadrant, so we aren’t the only ones who are confident in their abilities.

Other technologies that monitor and identify potential issues do exist. The point is: learn the lessons offered by the disastrous data breaches of recent years and build a system that’s meant to prevent them. Yes, that might mean hiring skilled and experienced people and spending money to do it right, including a major technology overhaul if you haven’t already moved to the cloud.

But it’s a safe bet that hackers will continue to hack, and every organization that handles data is at risk. Building a technology foundation today that guards against potential issues tomorrow (or sooner) is the smart way for you to avoid becoming a news headline yourself.

Ready to Protect Your Company? As the only Splunk Premier MSP and Elite Professional Services partner in North America, TekStream is uniquely positioned to ensure your Splunk security solution is implemented successfully and your SOC is managed properly. Learn More.

Integrating Splunk Phantom with Splunk Enterprise

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By: Joe Wohar | Splunk Consultant

 

There are multiple apps that can be used to integrate Phantom with Splunk, each exists for a different reason. Some of the functionality overlaps. The intent of this post is to provide a guide to knowing which one to leverage based upon what environment you are working in and what use cases are driving your requirement.

 

Application Install Target Usage
Splunk App for Phantom Phantom Pull event data from Splunk, push event data to Splunk, add Splunk actions to Phantom playbooks.
Phantom App for Splunk Splunk Push event data to Phantom
Phantom Remote Search Splunk Push Phantom data to Splunk
Splunk App for Phantom Reporting Splunk Report on Phantom data
Splunk Add-on for Phantom Splunk Used for monitoring Phantom as a service in Splunk ITSI

 

Splunk App for Phantom

The Splunk App for Phantom is a Phantom app used to connect Phantom to Splunk. Phantom apps that are built by Splunk are installed in Phantom by default, so no installation is required, however, you’ll need to configure an asset for it. In the asset settings, you’ll need the IP/hostname of your Splunk instance as well as a Splunk user with sufficient access to the data you wish to search. The Splunk App for Phantom can do the following: post data to Splunk as events, update notable events, run SPL queries, and pull events from Splunk to Phantom. 

  • To pull events from Splunk to Phantom, you’ll need to configure the asset settings and ingest settings in your configured asset. It is recommended that you create a new label in Phantom for the events you pull in from Splunk, which will make it easier to find the events in the Analyst Queue in Phantom.
  • There are four included actions which can be used in playbooks:
    • get host events – retrieves events about a specific host from Splunk
    • post data – creates an event in your Splunk instance
    • run query – runs an SPL query in Splunk and returns the results of the search to Phantom
    • update event – updates specified notable events within your Splunk Enterprise Security instance

For specific details on using these actions, search for “splunk” on the Apps page in Phantom and click the Documentation link:

 

Phantom App for Splunk https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/3411/

The Phantom App for Splunk is a Splunkbase app that is installed in Splunk and connects Splunk to Phantom. The main function of this app is to send data from Splunk to Phantom. First, you’ll need to go through the Phantom Server Configuration page to connect Splunk to Phantom, which will require an automation user in Phantom. Then, to send events to Phantom, you’ll need to create a saved search in Splunk where the results of the search are the events you want ingested into Phantom. Open the Phantom App for Splunk and create a New Saved Search Export to start sending events over. There is also an option to create a Data Model Export, which follows the same set of steps used for exporting saved search results to Phantom:

This app also contains alert actions that can be used in Splunk Enterprise Security:

  • Send to Phantom – sends the event(s) that triggered the alert to Phantom
  • Run Playbook in Phantom – sends the event(s) that triggered the alert to Phantom and runs the specified playbook on them

For more information about the Phantom App for Splunk, review the following documents:

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/PhantomApp

https://my.phantom.us/4.6/docs/admin/splunk

 

Phantom Remote Search https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/4153/

The Phantom Remote Search app is used for multiple reasons. Phantom has an embedded Splunk Enterprise instance built into it, however, you can configure Phantom to use an external Splunk Enterprise instance instead via this app. To do this, you’ll need to install the Phantom Remote Search app onto your Splunk instance, which contains Splunk roles needed for creating two Splunk users required by Phantom. You’ll also need to setup an HTTP Event Collector (HEC) input for receiving Phantom data. After installing the app, creating the necessary users, and creating the HEC input, you can go over to Phantom and change the “Search Settings” in the “Administration Settings”:

Click the following link for a more detailed list of instructions:

https://my.phantom.us/4.6/docs/admin/administration#SearchSettings

This app is also very useful because once you have completed the setup, Phantom will start sending data about itself over to Splunk. This allows you to shift your Phantom reporting out of Phantom and into Splunk. If your Phantom instance is brand new with no events and no active playbooks, configure an asset or create a playbook to test whether or not Phantom data is being sent to Splunk.

 

Splunk App for Phantom Reporting https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/4399/

If you have already installed the Phantom Remote Search app onto your Splunk instance and configured your Search Settings in Phantom to use an external Splunk instance, you can install the Splunk App for Phantom Reporting onto your Splunk instance to gain insights into Phantom automation and containers:

Splunk Add-on for Phantom https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/4726/

The Splunk Add-on for Phantom is a Splunk add-on is designed for use with Splunk ITSI to monitor your Phantom instance, although ITSI is not a pre-requisite, it can also be used with Splunk Enterprise but it publishes metrics in a manner that is consistent with ITSI health metrics. It also expects installation of the Phantom Remote Search add-on. The Phantom Remote Search add-on defines indexes and roles used by Phantom when Phantom is configured to use an external Splunk instance for search data. The Phantom Remote Search add-on is required in order to use the Content Pack for Monitoring Phantom as a Service. If you do want to use Splunk ITSI to monitor Phantom, you can follow the documentation for that here:

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/ITSICP/current/Config/AboutPhantom

For more information about Phantom, register at https://my.phantom.us/ which will give you access to knowledge articles, documentation, playbooks, and the OVA for Phantom so you can try it out yourself!

Need more help? Contact us today!

Why Splunk on AWS?

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AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and widely-adopted cloud platform, offering over 165 services from data centers all over the globe. AWS allows you to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability. The platform serves businesses from everyone from government agencies and Fortune 1,000 companies to small businesses and entrepreneurial startups.

Should your business consider using AWS? Changing databases to AWS is easy with the AWS database migration service, or by using AWS managed services or an AWS consulting agency.  Here’s why AWS is amongst the leading cloud computing services.

Reason #1: It’s Flexible 

Anyone can sign up for AWS and use the services without advanced programming language skills. AWS prioritizes consumer-centered design thinking, allowing users to select their preferred operating system, programming language, database, and other vital preferences. They also provide comprehensive developer resources and informative tools available to help maintain AWS’s ease of use and keep it up-to-date. 

Whether your team has the time to learn AWS or has access to AWS consulting, training users is simple. AWS offers their services with a no-commitment approach. Many software solutions use this as a way to market monthly subscriptions, but AWS services are charged on an hourly basis. As soon as you terminate a server, billing won’t include the next hour.   

With AWS, you can spin-up a new server within a matter of minutes compared to the hours or days it takes to procure a new traditional server. Plus, there’s no need to buy separate licenses for the new server. 

Reason #2: It’s Cost-Effective 

With AWS, you pay based on your actual usage. AWS’s cloud solution makes paying for what you use the standard for database storage, content delivery, compute power, and other services. No more fixed server cost or on-prem monitoring fees. Your cost structure scales as your business scales, providing your company with an affordable option that correlates with its current needs. This results in lower capital expenditure and faster time to value without sacrificing application performance or user experience. Amazon also has a strong focus on reducing infrastructure cost for buyers. 

Reason #3: It’s Secure 

Cloud security is the highest priority at AWS. Global banks, military, and other highly-sensitive organizations rely on AWS, which is backed by a deep set of cloud security tools. Maintaining high standards of security without managing your own facility allows companies to focus on scaling their business, with the help of:  

  • AWS multiple availability zones (which consist of one or more data centers around the globe with redundant power, networking, and connectivity) that aid your business in remaining resilient to most failure modes, like natural disasters or system failures. 
  • Configured, built-in firewall rules that allow you to transition from completely public to private or somewhere in between to control access according to circumstance.

Multiple Migration Options

Depending on your unique business and tech stack needs, AWS offers companies multiple options for realizing its host of benefits. For Splunk, those options include:

  1. Migrate your Splunk On-Prem directly to AWS
  2. Migrate your Splunk On-Prem to Splunk Cloud (which sits on AWS)

Migrating to the cloud can be a business challenge, but AWS makes it simpler. While on the journey towards stronger digital security and efficiency, AWS can save time and resources. With its flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and security, you can easily deploy a number of software-based processes to an inclusive cloud-based solution.

Implementing Right-Click Integrations in Splunk

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By: Eric Howell | Splunk Consultant

 

Splunk provides Admins the opportunity to build a huge variety of customizations, visualizations, apps, and a near-infinitude of different options to finely tune your Splunk experience and have it best suit your needs. There is a use case and a solution for almost any task you can throw at Splunk. A use case that has been brought up frequently is to implement a “Right-Click Integration” to allow information from Splunk to be passed to another tool. Originally, this seemed a daunting task that could require the implementation of custom java script or a unique python script to solve for. Ultimately, the solution was much simpler and the logic is already found in Splunk – Workflow Actions!

Workflow actions allow for Splunk to perform a variety of tasks against available web resources for information found in ingested field/value pairs. They can be very easy to set up either through the UI or by deploying a workflow_actions.conf, as best depends on the size of your Splunk environment, and they offer quite a bit of additional functionality. Utilizing this functionality, your “Right-Click” integration may require an extra click, but it will be fully functional and should be fully serviceable.

Leveraging Workflow Actions to Pass Values and Fields

As discussed above, to set up a workflow action, an admin can leverage the WebUI on one of the Search Heads in an environment or deploy the workflow_actions.conf file as appropriate. This will allow a user to expand an event and pass a value from a field to an external source. In the examples below, we will use VirusTotal as an example.

WebUI Setup

For this example, we will be posting the value of a field to VirusTotal, allowing us to search their IOC database and verify if the value we are passing is a known, bad entity.

  1. Navigate to the Settings Dropdown in the Splunk navigator (In the top right by default) and select Fields under Knowledge

2. Next, you will select “Add new” in the “Workflow actions” category

3. This next step encompasses what this workflow action will do. We begin with creating a Label for the action, which will be what users see when they move to access it. Note, you can leverage             tokens in this descriptor to input values dynamically, based on what is clicked. In the case here, it will show the specific value that is being presented to VirusTotal.

4. Then you will indicate, in a comma-separated list, the fields that this workflow action can apply to. Leaving this blank will appear in all field menus.

 

5. If needed, the next step will be to select which eventtypes this workflow_action is applicable for. For additional reading on eventtypes: Follow this Link

a. Eventtypes are categorizations of data input by the user or an admin. An example would be when a specific IP address is found in your web data (sourcetype=access_combined src_ip=127.0.0.1), and you want to apply specific categorization to data that meets that criteria so that it appears with a new field/value pair (e.g. eventtype=local_access)

6. Next you will choose if the action is available in the Event Menu, Fields Menu, or both. This selection is a dropdown. Additional reading available here: Follow this Link

a. Event Menu – Will allow for you to apply this workflow action on the whole event. When an event returned by your search is expanded, the “Event Actions” dropdown will hold any workflow action with “Event Menu” selected here.

b. Fields Menus – Similar to the above, on an expanded event, the workflow action can be accessed by clicking the dropdown under “Action” in the list of included fields to allow one to apply the workflow action directly to the value of a specific field.

7. Next is to choose the Action type – meaning whether the workflow action acts as a “link” to another web location or whether it will run another “search”

8. The next step is configuring the properties based on which of the above Action Types was chosen

a. Link Configuration – Allows you to specify a URI (also accepts tokens), decide whether to open the link in a new window, select whether you intend to utilize a POST or GET method, and which arguments to pass to the web site.

b. Search Configuration – Allows you to specify a search string (token-friendly), dictate which app to run the search in, determine a name of a view (page) for the search to open in, whether to run the search in the same window, and input a timeframe.

9. Next click Save

 

Your workflow action is ready to test. Here is an example of what you can see when looking in an event view with an expanded event.

Deploying a workflow_actions.conf

Like most other configuration files, workflow_actions.conf is easily deployed via the method of your choosing (manually, scripted, or through the use of the Deployer). Below is what will be generated by Splunk in $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/system/local when created through the web UI:

 

[VirusTotalPost]

display_location = both

label = Search VirusTotal for $@field_value$

link.method = post

link.uri = https://www.virustotal.com/en/search/

link.target = blank

link.postargs.1.key = query

link.postargs.1.value = $@field_value$

type = link

 

This same information is deployable in an app of your choosing to $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/ as appropriate for environments with clustered Search Heads or through other means of configuration management.

There are a wide variety of possible options with the stanza, and I recommend reviewing Splunk’s documentation regarding the specific .conf file here:

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Admin/Workflow_actionsconf

Leveraging your workflow_actions with older versions of Splunk Enterprise Security

If you are utilizing a version of the Splunk Enterprise Security app prior to 5.3, even if your workflow actions have global permissions, the app will not import configurations from others unless they follow a strict naming convention. If you want your workflow action to be accessible from the Incident Review dashboard, for example, you will need to make sure your app follows the one of these naming conventions:

  • DA-ESS-*
  • SA-*
  • TA-*
  • Splunk_SA_*
  • Splunk_TA_*
  • Splunk_DA-ESS_*

 

Want to learn more about right-click integrations in Splunk? Contact us today!

 

Deep Freeze Your Splunk Data in AWS

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By: Zubair Rauf | Splunk Consultant

 

In today’s day and age, storage has become a commodity, but, even now, reliable high-speed storage comes at a substantial cost. For on-premise Splunk deployments, Splunk recommends RAID 0 or 1+0 disks capable of at least 1200 IOPS and this increases in high-volume environments. Similarly, in bring-your-own-license cloud deployments, customers prefer to use SSD storage with at least 1200 IOPS or more.

Procuring these disks and maintaining them can carry a hefty recurring price tag. Aged data, that no longer needs to be accessed on a daily basis but has to be stored because of corporate governance policies or regulatory requirements, can effectively increase the storage cost for companies if done on these high-performance disks.

This data can securely be moved to Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, S3 Glacier, or other inexpensive storage options of the Admin’s choosing.

In this blog post, we will dive into a script that we have developed at TekStream which can move buckets from Indexer Clusters to AWS S3 seamlessly, without duplication. It will only move one good copy of the bucket and ignore any duplicates (replicated buckets).

During the process of setting up indexes, Splunk Admins can decide and set data retention on a per-index basis by setting the ‘frozenTimePeriodInSecs’ setting in indexes.conf. This allows the admins to be flexible on their retention levels based on the type of data. Once the data becomes of age, Splunk deletes it or moves it to frozen storage.

Splunk achieves this by referring to the coldToFrozenScript setting in indexes.conf. If a coldToFrozenScript is defined, Splunk will run that script; once it successfully executes without problems, Splunk will go ahead and delete the aged bucket from the indexer.

The dependencies for this script include the following;

–   Python 2.7 – Installed with Splunk

–   AWS CLI tools – with credentials already working.

–   AWS Account, Access Key and Secret Key

–   AWS S3 Bucket

Testing AWS Connectivity

After you have installed AWS CLI and set it up with the Secret Key and Access Key for your account, test connectivity to S3 by using the following command:

Note: Please ensure that the AWS CLI commands are installed under /usr/bin/aws and the AWS account you are using should have read and write access to S3 artifacts.

If AWS CLI commands are set-up correctly, this should return a list of all the S3 buckets in your account.

I have created a bucket titled “splunk-to-s3-frozen-demo”.

Populate the Script with Bucket Name

Once the S3 bucket is ready, you can copy the script to your $SPLUNK_HOME/bin folder. After copying the script, edit it and change the name of your S3 Bucket where you wish to freeze your buckets.

Splunk Index Settings

After you have made the necessary edits to the script, it is time to update the settings on your index in indexes.conf.

Depending on where your index is defined, we need to set the indexes.conf accordingly. On my demo instance, the index is defined in the following location:

In the indexes.conf, my index settings are defined as follows;

 

Note: These settings are only for a test index, that will roll any data off to frozen (or delete if a coldToFrozenScript is not present) after 600 seconds.

Once you have your settings complete in indexes.conf, please restart your Splunk instance. Splunk will read the new settings at restart.

After the restart, I can see my index on the Settings > Indexes page.

Once the index is set up, I use the Add Data Wizard to add some sample data to my index. Ideally, this data should roll over to warm, and the script should be moved to my AWS S3 bucket after 10 minutes.

The remote path on S3 will be set up in the following order:

If you are running this on an indexer cluster, the script will not copy duplicate buckets. It will only copy the first copy of a bucket and ignore the rest. This helps manage storage costs and does not keep multiple copies of the same buckets in S3.

Finally, once the script runs successfully, I can see my frozen Splunk bucket in AWS S3. If you are running this on an indexer cluster, the script will not copy duplicate buckets. It will only copy the first copy of a bucket and ignore the rest. This helps manage storage costs and does not keep multiple copies of the same buckets in S3.

Note: This demo test was done on Splunk Enterprise 8.0 using native Python 2.7.1 that ships with Splunk Enterprise. If you wish to use any other distribution on Python, you will have to modify the script to be compatible.

If there is an error and the bucket does not transfer to S3, or it is not deleted from the source folder, then you can troubleshoot it with the following search:

This search will show you the stdout error that is thrown when the script runs into an error.

To wrap it up, I would highly recommend that you do implement this in a dev/sandbox environment before rolling it out into production. Doing so will ensure that it is robust for your environment and make you comfortable with the set-up.

To learn more about how to set-up AWS CLI Tools for your environment, please refer to the following link; https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-install.html

If you have any questions or are interested in getting the script, contact us today!