Triage Any Alert With These Five Key Questions:-
Alert triage is a fundamental part of security operations, involving the review, investigation, and escalation of alerts into incidents. To ensure efficiency and accuracy, tools and processes must align with the natural workflows of analysts. At its core, effective triage revolves around answering five essential questions that guide investigation and response.
- Was this an actual attack?
Is the alert a false positive or true positive? To answer this quickly, analysts need clear context around the alert and fast access to supporting data (like PCAPs or logs).
2. Was the attack successful?
Many alerts stem from failed exploits. Focusing on later-stage indicators (e.g., post-exploitation activity) reduces noise. Analysts still need context and related evidence to judge success.
3. What other assets were compromised?
Scoping begins here. Analysts must build and maintain a dynamic list of affected assets (devices, accounts, etc.), tracking compromise status and key timestamps. Sharing this list in real time (e.g., via a wiki) ensures coordinated response.
4. What did the attacker do?
Understanding the attack narrative is critical. Analysts build evolving timelines to document attacker actions and incident milestones. Start simple (e.g., spreadsheets) and expand as needed. These timelines help guide response and reporting.
5. How should we respond?
Once scoped, plan your incident response—containment, remediation, and recovery. Having pre-built, tested playbooks tailored to your environment speeds up response. Where expertise is lacking, external help may be needed.
COMMON INFORMATION MODEL:-
The Common Information Model (CIM) standardizes data across different sources, making it easier to analyse and correlate within Splunk. Since most Splunk tools and features are designed to work with CIM-compliant data, adopting CIM significantly reduces the need for custom configurations. This ensures that reports, alerts, detections, and dashboards function seamlessly out of the box.
To achieve CIM compliance, ingested data can be normalized using Apps and Technical Add-ons (TAs)—whether custom-built or available from Splunk base.
DATA MODELS:-
The Common Information Model (CIM) in Splunk is a collection of standardized data models designed around common enterprise and security-related event types. These models provide a consistent structure for analysing data across diverse sources.
For SOC analysts, understanding these data models such as Authentication, Data Access, Endpoint, Malware, Network Traffic, Vulnerabilities, Web, and others enables faster and more targeted investigations by allowing them to focus on specific subsets of event data.