Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Security Posture with Splunk

Dennis Morton - May 2022

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Many organizations have invested in Splunk Enterprise Security. However, your security strength doesn't stop there. Splunk Enterprise Security allows organizations to combat threats with actionable intelligence and advanced analytics at scale. This helps teams:

  1. Reduce time to detect
  2. Streamline investigations
  3. Achieve faster time to value

However, implementing the product into your environment doesn't mean that your job is done. It means that your job has just started. Many organization fail to optimize their security posture and the SES software after product implementation. This results in the following gap areas:

  1. Alert fatigue - which occurs when notifications take over your daily operations
  2. Uncertainty on what to prioritize when fixing security issues due to the multiple notifications
  3. How to make the product work best for your business needs - it's a large platform that requires knowledge to fully optimize

With over 15 years in the Splunk space - our team has learned from wins and losses on how to improve your security posture in Splunk with efficiency and quality at top of mind. We've gathered our top five ways to improve your security posture in the list below.

1. Configuring and classifying Assets and Identities

Nothing in tech is ever cookie cutter. Especially because not all accounts and computers are the same because importance and power than others. For example, the CEO and the Executive Assistant to the CEO are highly important accounts to maintain as they are the lifeline to the business. In Splunk Enterprise Security - "Assets & Identities" is a feature that allows you to classify certain accounts based on their level of importance and function. By optimizing this section you will be able to protect your employees and company information from security attacks.

 

2. Leverage risk-based alerting

Have you ever logged into a software or platform and received an overload of alerts and felt overwhelmed? That's called "alert fatigue" and it can be your worse nightmare especially regarding security because it's never just one thing that went wrong. We advise you to implement dynamic risk rules within SES. This will help you focus on what's most important. For example, if you have 2 threat intelligence feeds and one is not as reliable as the other. With this feature you can decrease the risk from the less reliable one as you know it’s not as good as the latter.

 

3. Threat Intelligence Feed

Your Splunk Enterprise Security software will thank you for  purchasing open-source intelligence feeds. This is because Splunk will automatically catch a domain look up or a process claim for something that was marked as potentially bad. Even in a scenario where you get a hit with a threat, the feed will allow you to annotate it to ignore the hit in the future as it’s already been investigated and optimized for future prevention.

 

4. Leverage enterprise security investigations

This will allow you to consolidate your entire investigation of an incident into Splunk native content. This will result in shareable content via search results, PDFs, notes, etc.. This way your team can see what someone else did and respond accordingly.

 

5. Engage with trusted advisors to help you understand security posture

Splunk Enterprise Security is a large platform and in order to hit the ground running you need advisors that can help you customize the platform and understand the regulations. This will prevent your team from scrambling to find the answers, while they could be spending more time on actions that drive the business.

 


 

questions & resources

If you need any support or have any questions please feel free to contact us at hello@arcusdata.io. Our team has expertise