Webinar Report on Maximizing Security Insights: AWS Athena and Lambda Integration with Splunk

Introduction

Hello, Hemanth from the Alliance Department here. In this report, I will share insights from recent webinar on "Maximizing Security Insights - AWS Athena and Lambda Integration with Splunk". The session focused on leveraging AWS Athena and Lambda to extract actionable insights from rapidly generated data stored in S3 buckets, such as VPC logs, CloudTrail logs, and EDR telemetry.

Splunk

Splunk is a platform that makes it easier to explore historical and real-time data by gathering, indexing, and analyzing machine-generated data. Organizations looking to extract meaningful insights and discover threats from their data will find it helpful because to its robust search capabilities, monitoring tools, and security measures.

AWS

Is a secure cloud service platform that offers compute power, database storage, content delivery, network, and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. It is one of the first cloud vendors to start services in the year 2006. It offers all the 3 service models namely IAAS, PAAS, and SAAS. Some of the notable domains in AWS are Compute, Migration, Storage, Network and Content Delivery, Management Tools, Database, Messaging, Security and Identity Compliance, and many more.

AWS Athena

The serverless interactive query tool which enables users to perform typical SQL data analysis on data directly in Amazon S3. Simply pay for the queries you perform and is very scalable and economical as it doesn't require infrastructure administration. Numerous data formats, such as CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet, are supported by Athena. It is compatible with AWS Glue, which facilitates metadata management and data discovery. This eliminates the need for intricate ETL procedures and makes it simple to query and extract insights from big databases.

Lambda

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that takes care of the underlying infrastructure management and automatically runs your code in response to events. It's economical as you just pay for the compute time you utilize. It is compatible with a wide range of programming languages and can be started by custom events or AWS services. This makes server management unnecessary for the construction of responsive and scalable applications.

Speaker of the Session

Rajashekar Srinivasan, an SME with 9 years of IT experience in Splunk, led the session

Higher Log Value, Lower Log Volume

Proposed Solution

The proposed solution involves filtering unnecessary logs in AWS and analyzing only the required logs in Splunk.

Integration Process

Down below states how the above the proposed solution can be implemented.

Merits of Proposed Solution

The proposed solution offers several advantages, including reduced ingestion costs and the inclusion of crucial security data in Splunk.

Issues and Solutions

While implementing this solution, various issues may arise. Below are potential solutions to common challenges:

Conclusion

Actionable insights can be extracted from data stored in S3 buckets, including VPC logs, CloudTrail logs, and EDR telemetry, by utilizing AWS Athena and Lambda. By incorporating these insights into Splunk, one may effectively reduce ingestion expenses and guarantee that critical security data is included in Splunk's enterprise security suite. Using Athena to query data, running Lambda scripts for analytics, and ingesting the resulting data into Splunk are all part of the integration process.