Detecting data exfiltration activities
When attackers are looking to identify and exfiltrate data from a target organization, they carry out attacks which contain three main activities: identification, collection, and staging data for exfiltration.
- Identification includes scanning systems and observing user activity.
- Collection includes the transfer of large amounts of data from various repositories.
- Staging, or preparation, includes moving data to a central location and compressing it, also optionally encoding or encrypting it.
These searches allow you to detect and monitor suspicious behavior related to these activities.
Required data
How to use Splunk software for this use case
- DNS exfiltration using NSLOOKUP app
- Excessive usage of NSLOOKUP app
- Linux Curl upload file
- Mailsniper invoke functions
- Multiple archive files http post traffic
- O365 PST export alert
- O365 mailbox forwarding enabled
- Plain HTTP POST exfiltrated data
- Next steps
In addition, these Splunk resources might help you understand and implement this use case:
- Blog: Threat Hunting with Splunk: Hands-on Tutorials for the Active Hunter
- If you are a Splunk Enterprise Security customer, you can also get help from the Security Research team's support options on GitHub.