Migrating Splunk Storage to S3 SmartStore

Splunk is a software technology that allows you to index, search, analyze, and visualize data at scale. I use it to ingest logs from my honeypots, homelab, and other projects. Initially, I had Splunk running in a local virtual machine where everything was fine except for the downtime, so I rapidly migrated it to an Amazon … Read more

Ingesting PCAP Files with Zeek and Splunk

Whenever I want to analyze a relatively small packet capture (PCAP), I load it up in Wireshark and get the job done. However, this process does not scale and becomes a problem with large-sized pcap files. Even if you split, let’s say, a 25 terabyte PCAP up into smaller chunks, can you imagine how long it would … Read more

Blue Team Tactics: Honey Tokens Pt. III

This is the final part of a multipart blog post, read part one and two then continue here. In part 2, we simulated adversary interaction with our deployed tokens and then leveraged Windows Event Viewer to assess the generated artifacts. What follows will be several options for getting the audit logs from the endpoints to … Read more

Blue Team Tactics: Honey Tokens Pt. II

This is a multipart blog post, read part one and then continue here. We enabled filesystem auditing, created our audit template, and staged our honey tokens for deployment in part one. In part two, we will deploy the honey tokens and identify various methods for monitoring adversary interaction. Deploying honey tokens using PowerShell (PoSh) I … Read more

FreeIPA integration with Splunk

Splunk has built-in user authentication; however, if you have multiple deployments or a clustered environment, it makes sense to utilize centralized user management. FreeIPA provides a solution similar to a Domain Controller in an Active Directory (AD) environment. Setting up FreeIPA is outside the scope of this document, and we will instead focus on how to integrate Splunk … Read more

DIY IP Threat Feed

A threat feed is a collection of actionable information about threats that allows for mitigating harmful events. This blog post is concerned with developing an IP based threat feed or blacklist. We will look at how to gather, aggregate, enrich, and extract threat data for consumption. Gathering the threat data I have several servers in … Read more

Replacing the Default Splunk Web SSL Certificate

This post  goes over how to sign a SplunkWeb Certificate Signing Request (CSR) using my Root CA in pfSense. I do not cover creating the Root CA. Step 1: Create the directory for the certificates splunk@siem:~$ mkdir /opt/splunk/etc/auth/certs Step 2: Generate the private key and temporary password splunk@siem:~$ cd /opt/splunk/etc/auth/certs splunk@siem:~$ splunk cmd openssl genrsa … Read more

Tracking SSH Brute-force Logins with Splunk

If you manage servers with OpenSSH access, you have no doubt been subject to the barrage of ssh brute-force attempts that occurs across the internet. Some administrators deal with this by either changing the default port (security by obscurity), utilizing public keys, threshold blocking, or white-listing source IP addresses among other things. AWS has security … Read more