IBM TeaLeaf + Splunk = Powerful fraud investigation and security analytics platform for financial firms. Part 3: Visualizing Trends and Patterns of Cyberattacks

Visualizing Cyber Attack TrendsOnce you got all the beautiful and rich traffic data exported from Tealeaf and imported in Splunk – the possibilities are virtually endless to create very powerful search and cross referencing analytics and security investigation tool.

Within my consulting work for a major financial services firm I’ve built a specialized Splunk App that allows using single dashboard to execute multiple searches and visualize results and trends by leveraging Tealeaf data.

In addition to that a number of custom searches and alerts were created to create summary indexes and automatically detect and alert on possible malware infections, notify about suspicious activity patterns and out of bound activities.

Before sharing more details about visualizing trends and malicious traffic patterns – here are few tips on general design of custom Splunk security analytic apps and dashboards with Splunk.

While I cannot offer image snapshots of the actual dashboard’s visuals used within financial firm due to obvious client’s security concerns, I can describe the general approach we took to overcome Tealeaf’s limitations with Splunk as well as number of important points on how to take the most advantage of Splunk as a security research tool. (more…)