Splunk Search

Identifying Authentication Irregularities

ryangibson99
Explorer

I've been tasked with searching for authentication irregularities and I am fairly new to splunk. Authentication irregularities is fairly broad and so I am wondering if the splunk community has any suggestions! Thanks in advance. And if you were wondering, yes I have read the manual already.

0 Karma

mw
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

Here are a couple of examples. Searches are sometimes specific to certain data or field extractions, so you probably won't get too many that will just work right off the bat for you, but these should give you some ideas.

For SSH logins: show me cases where there were at least 6 failed logins followed by a successful login (i.e. possible brute force login attack)

"failed password" OR "accepted password" | stats list(sshd_action) as list by host, user | eval list = mvjoin(list, " ") | eval alert = if(match(list, "Accepted (?:Failed\s?){6,}"), "True", "False") | where alert == "True"

Nice for a chart of the count of failed logins per user vs. the avg number of failed logins per user

(failed password) OR (logon failed) | stats count by user, host | eventstats avg(count) as avg | fields user, avg, count

jwalzerpitt
Influencer

MV,

Running the chart of the count of failed logins per user vs. the avg number of failed logins per user search query, but I'm getting the same output in the average column for every user. Is that correct?

I'm seeing the following:

USER AVG COUNT
UserA 1.208333 3

UserB 1.208333 2
UserC 1.208333 1
etc

Thx

0 Karma

ryangibson99
Explorer

MW thanks so much, I am pretty new to Splunk this really helped.

0 Karma
Got questions? Get answers!

Join the Splunk Community Slack to learn, troubleshoot, and make connections with fellow Splunk practitioners in real time!

Meet up IRL or virtually!

Join Splunk User Groups to connect and learn in-person by region or remotely by topic or industry.

Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

Developer Spotlight with Denis Gladkikh

From Splunk Engineer to Kubernetes App Builder Denis GladkikhWhat happens when a lifelong developer turns a ...

Governing Enterprise AI, Bringing Cisco Telemetry Home, and More from Splunk Lantern

Splunk Lantern is Splunk’s customer success center that provides practical guidance from Splunk experts on key ...

Agentic SOC Triage: Investigating Splunk ES Notables with MCP Server and a Local LLM

The Problem: Too Many Alerts, Too Little Context Security operations teams running Splunk Enterprise Security ...