Free Splunk SPLK-5001 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 3

Hacktivismrefers to the use of hacking techniques by an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group to promote a political agenda or social cause. Unlike other motivations such as financial gain or espionage, the primary goal of hacktivism is to disrupt, damage, or deface systems to draw attention to a cause or to protest against something the group opposes.

Hacktivism:

APT groups motivated by hacktivism typically target organizations or entities that they see as adversaries to their cause. The attacks can range from defacing websites to launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks to disrupt services.

This form of cyber activity is intended to create awareness or send a message, often aligning with the group's ideological beliefs.

Incorrect Options:

B. Cyber espionage:Focuses on gathering intelligence and sensitive information, often for national or corporate advantage, not necessarily for disruption.

C. Financial gain:Involves attacks aimed at monetary theft, not ideologically driven disruption.

D. Prestige:While some attacks are motivated by the desire for recognition, hacktivism specifically refers to ideological causes.

The correct Splunk search that returns results in the most performant way isindex=foo host=i-478619733 | stats range(_time) as duration by src_ip | bin duration span=5min | stats count by duration, host. This search is optimized by:

Starting with the most specific search criteria (index and host) to reduce the data set.

Applying aggregation functions (stats) early, which helps minimize the amount of data processed in subsequent commands.

Usingbinto group data efficiently before performing further statistical calculations.

Search Optimization:

Efficient Indexing:By specifyingindex=fooandhost=i-478619733at the start, the search limits the scope of data that needs to be processed, which significantly improves performance.

Early Aggregation:Thestatscommand is used early in the search to aggregate data bysrc_ip, which reduces the volume of data passed to the next stages of the pipeline.

Use ofbin:Grouping durations withbinbefore performing a secondstatsaggregation reduces the number of unique values, making the final stats calculation more efficient.

Performance Considerations:

Order of Operations:Splunk processes search commands from left to right. Starting with a broad data retrieval and then narrowing down with stats and bin commands ensures that the least amount of data is processed in the final stages.

Avoiding Suboptimal Patterns:The other options either apply operations in a less efficient order or involve unnecessary steps that increase processing time and resource usage.

The key requirement is to calculate arunning total of distinct IP addressesover time, which involves both aggregation (stats dc(clientip) by _time) and cumulative calculation (streamstats dc(ipa) as "Cumulative total").

Option Acorrectly bins events by day (bin _time span=1d), calculates distinct counts (dc(clientip)) per day, and then applies streamstats to compute the running (cumulative) count across the timeline.

Option Bcalculates daily distinct counts but does not provide a running total.

Option Csimply formats a table without aggregation.

Option Daggregates by user, not by day, and misses cumulative counts.

TheSplunk Search Manualrecommends using streamstats with distinct count fields to obtain running totals for time series data.

Continuous Monitoring Cycle:This cycle is part of a broader security strategy that involves constantly assessing and managing the security state of an organization's information systems. The phases generally include defining metrics, collecting data, analyzing it, reporting findings, and implementing improvements.

Analyze and Report Phase:

Data Evaluation:In this phase, the data collected from various monitoring tools and sensors is thoroughly analyzed. Security analysts look for trends, anomalies, and indications of potential threats or vulnerabilities.

Reporting:After the analysis, a report is generated that highlights the findings, including any detected issues, their potential impact, and the current effectiveness of security measures.

Recommendations:Based on the analysis, the report usually includes suggestions for improvements, such as additional security controls, configuration changes, or policy updates. These recommendations are aimed at enhancing the organization's security posture and addressing any identified gaps or weaknesses.

Purpose of Recommendations:The goal of this phase is to ensure that the organization’s security measures are continuously improved based on the latest data and threat landscape. It is a critical step in maintaining an effective security program that adapts to new challenges.

In Splunk, therexcommand is used to extract fields from raw event data using regular expressions. This command allows analysts to dynamically extract additional fields as part of a search pipeline, which is crucial for creating new fields during search time based on specific patterns found in the log data. Therexcommand is highly flexible and powerful, making it essential for refining and manipulating data in a Splunk environment. The other options (fields,regex,eval) have their uses, butrexis specifically designed for dynamic field extraction.

In Splunk, to filter users with over a thousand occurrences, the pipeline| stats count by user | where count > 1000 | sort - countis most effective. Thestats count by usercommand generates a count of occurrences for each user. Thewhereclause then filters out only those users who have more than 1000 occurrences. Finally,sort - countsorts the results in descending order by count. This approach is efficient for identifying outliers, such as users with a high number of events.

For creating a custom dashboard focused on typosquatting, theNew Domain Analysisdashboard in Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) would be a relevant starting point. Typosquatting typically involves the registration of domains similar to legitimate domains to deceive users, which is closely related to the analysis of newly registered or observed domains. This dashboard already includes tools and visualizations for monitoring and analyzing domain name activity, which can be adapted for the specific needs of monitoring for typosquatting.

TheContinuous Monitoringcycle begins with theDefine and Predictphase, where the security team establishes what needs to be monitored (defining assets, risks, controls) and predicts potential threats and vulnerabilities. This foundational phase sets objectives and scope for the monitoring program.

Subsequent phases likeMonitor and Protect,Assess and Evaluate, andRespond and Recoverfollow the initial definition.

This phased approach aligns with frameworks such as NIST’s Risk Management Framework and Continuous Monitoring guidelines.

Splunk’s cybersecurity documentation highlights the importance of this first phase for establishing a proactive and informed security posture.

To investigate which process initiated a network connection, an analyst would use theEndpointdata model in Splunk Enterprise Security. The Endpoint data model contains fields related to processes, file activity, and host-level data, which are essential for tracing back the source of suspicious network activity to the specific process or application that initiated it. This is crucial for understanding the scope of an attack and determining the origin of malicious network traffic.

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