Sourcefire developed Snort, an open source intrusion prevention system capable of real-time traffic analysis and packet logging. Snort was acquired (and is now supported) by Cisco in 2013.
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Splunk Enterprise Security (ES)
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Splunk Enterprise Security (SIEM) is the company's flagship SIEM product, offered as a premium service to subscribers of Splunk Cloud or Splunk Enterprise.
If a colleague was looking to tighten down their network I can easily recommend Snort to them. It gives you some more peace of mind knowing that its always scanning traffic for malicious looking code. Even things your major firewalls and security hardware might miss, Snort has picked up. Its an easy recommendation for me.
Well suited: Splunk ES is highly recommended in an environment with many data sources and experienced computer engineers. It has a steep learning curve, but once that hurdle is crossed, it is absolutely a beast. It is also very expensive, so a company putting a high amount of budget in Security is needed. Not well suited: Splunk ES is not recommended if a company has only a few sources and some non-technical IT users. The price won't justify the fewer data sources and scratching just the surface level. Moreover, non-technical IT users would be better off with something that has a query builder, unlike Splunk.
Advanced Threat Detection and Correlation: ES stands out in its ability to detect sophisticated threats by correlating data from multiple sources. For instance, it can identify unusual patterns in user behavior, cross-referencing with network logs to flag potential insider threats.
Real-time Monitoring and Alerting: ES offers robust real-time monitoring capabilities. It excels in promptly alerting us to critical security events, such as suspicious network traffic spikes or unauthorized access attempts, allowing for immediate response.
Comprehensive Log Analysis: ES ingests and analyzes an extensive range of log data. It's particularly adept at parsing and making sense of complex log formats, making it a versatile tool for understanding system activities and security events.
ES on the cloud (SaaS) has too many limitations with platform administration.
Supported integrations are not always on par with enterprise support especially when dependent on 3rd-party proprietary APIs.
In later versions, unforeseen glitches seem to show up that have no resolution except version upgrade. This used to not be the case in prior versions which were very stable.
You definitely need to learn how to use Splunk to get the most of the tool. There are many courses available for free to get up to speed on the usability of the tool but it's not that simple. It will take time to digest all the data and to understand how to query for what you are looking for.
ES requires a very performant infrastructure: if it has it's performant, otherwise not. I had situation with a very performant infrastructure and I didn't notized that it was a distributed architecture, it seemed that there ware few data on my PC, othewise I experienced less performant infrastructures with less performaces.
It's good when it's responsive, but I've had times where I had to wait quite a while for a response. But these are typically the exceptions rather than the rule. When you do get a response it is always well-informed and appropriate. I would say they've been trending better over time with this.
I experienced only on-line training, but the trainers were very professional and competent. Maybe it could be more useful if they also have an experience in projects because sometimes they didn't have a real project experience to communicate to the students. Anyway, it was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself, aven if I have more than 10 years of Splunk activity experience.
It was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself. The only problem was that, when I worked with the Splunk Professional Services, I found some difference between the training contents and the information from PS. In addition is required a long experience on Splunk Enterprise for the data ingestion part, in other words I'm able to work with ES because I'm worling on Splunk since 11 years, otherwise I'd some problem.
For our organization, the Cisco defense in depth concept works the best. While Cisco can be made to work with other vendors, we have found the best in depth protection by integrating Cisco products for maximum visibility. We had a Barracuda Web Filter, but it was difficult to maintain when you had limited scope on what you could block, so we created a whitelist only setup which required a lot of additional manpower. This wouldn't have covered new threats with DNS spoofing and the like. Sourcefire also integrated with our anti-malware platform (Cisco AMP) for even better visibility on what may be happening on the end users workstation. We are planning on adding in Cisco ISE to complete the approach and possibly stealthwatch to cover our bases in the future. The Palo Alto gear was interesting, but it was priced far out of our range.
Splunk enterprise is the only solution that we’ve been able to identify that provides risk based alerting, which allows our SOC to reduce analyst fatigue which would be a huge problem without it. Before RBA, there were thousands of alerts a day and it was impossible to review all of them
for my exterience, unit pricing and billing frequency are correct. As I already said, I hint to have more discount flexibility, expecially with new customers, because there are competitors less expensive and very aggressive that are dangerous. In addition the possibility to don't pay the license for the development period could be a very interesting feature for the final customers.
- 8 out of 10 and took 2 for the data pipeline and administration part. Even if you'd like to improve yourself or your team, you have to pay a lot of money and it could be more than GIAC education + cert. - Normalization for Data models and CPU-based searches can be a problem sometimes.
I had a fantastic experience with Splunk Professional Services: they worked with us in our last SON project (a SOC migration for a very large customer) and helped to build a multi tenent environment even if ES isn't a multi tenant platform. Th Splunk PS was a very professional and competent people, he is italian and was able to speak with our italian customers.
ES has highly impacted ROI because as the customer of the ES the work we do for creating use cases for clients in terms of security-related aspects by their logs has given more return than investment.
The correlation searches we run to get detailed results from the Data models are very less time-consuming than Splunk Enterprise itself we can get quick responses to the use cases and dashboards populated because of ES.
The CIM compliance feature is ES has made more jobs easy in the terms of finding more Authentication related data we can get data onboarded in the Email data model from O365 and search is email data model instead of searching for particular indexes.