Security Operations Centers (SOCs) serve as a critical line of defense against today's constantly evolving cybersecurity threats. At the heart of these teams are SOC analysts, who monitor, detect, and respond around the clock to potential attacks.

The post The Life of a SOC Analyst: Responsibilities, Challenges, and Strategies for Success appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Spend time performing forensic analysis on the Windows Operating System and you'll see a host of artifacts that can be used to identify adversary activity. From changes to the registry to the System Resource Utilization Monitor, Windows artifacts run deep. The challenge is locating, extracting, and parsing these artifacts in an efficient manner.

The post KAPE 101: A Kroll Artifact Parser and Extractor Cheatsheet appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

We're all petrified about missing a critical event or misclassifying an alert, but when we're talking about incident response (IR), there are often hundreds if not thousands of alerts to parse through. It's easy to get caught up with one alert because it feels "too hot" or maybe not spend enough time looking into something that initially seems "too cold."

The post Finding the “Goldilocks” Zone: A Practical Approach to Alert Triage appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

What happens when you ditch the tiered ticket queues and replace them with collaboration, agility, and real-time response? In this interview, Hayden Covington takes us behind the scenes of the BHIS Security Operations Center, which is where analysts don’t escalate tickets, they solve them.

The post Inside the BHIS SOC: A Conversation with Hayden Covington  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

But what if we need to wrangle Windows Event Logs for more than one system? In part 2, we’ll wrangle EVTX logs at scale by incorporating Hayabusa and SOF-ELK into my rapid endpoint investigation workflow (“REIW”)! 

The post Wrangling Windows Event Logs with Hayabusa & SOF-ELK (Part 2) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

In part 1 of this post, we’ll discuss how Hayabusa and “Security Operations and Forensics ELK” (SOF-ELK) can help us wrangle EVTX files (Windows Event Log files) for maximum effect during a Windows endpoint investigation!

The post Wrangling Windows Event Logs with Hayabusa & SOF-ELK (Part 1) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Remember the good ‘ol days of Zip drives, Winamp, the advent of “Office 365,” and copy machines that didn’t understand email authentication? Okay, maybe they weren’t so good! For a […]

The post Stop Spoofing Yourself! Disabling M365 Direct Send appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

In this video, John Strand discusses the complexities and challenges of penetration testing, emphasizing that it goes beyond just finding and exploiting vulnerabilities.

The post 5 Things We Are Going to Continue to Ignore in 2025 appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Changes to the msds-KeyCredentialLink attribute are not audited/logged with standard audit configurations. This required serious investigations and a partner firm in infosec provided us the answer: TrustedSec.  So, credit where […]

The post Enable Auditing of Changes to msDS-KeyCredentialLink  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Recently in the SOC, we were notified by a partner that they had a potential business email compromise, or BEC. We commonly catch these by identifying suspicious email forwarding rules, […]

The post Monitoring High Risk Azure Logins  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

While social engineering attacks such as phishing are a great way to gain a foothold in a target environment, direct attacks against externally exploitable services are continuing to make headlines. […]

The post In Through the Front Door – Protecting Your Perimeter   appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Be sure to read PART 1! Metadata and a New-Fashioned Bank Robbery Let’s face it, some cases are just more interesting than others and, when you do incident response for […]

The post OSINT for Incident Response (Part 2) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Being a digital forensics and incident response consultant is largely about unanswered questions. When we engage with a client, they know something bad happened or is happening, but they are […]

The post OSINT for Incident Response (Part 1) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Patterson Cake // PART 1 PART 2 In part one of “Wrangling the M365 UAL,” we talked about acquiring, parsing, and querying UAL data using PowerShell and SOF-ELK. In part […]

The post Wrangling the M365 UAL with SOF-ELK and CSV Data (Part 3 of 3) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Patterson Cake // When it comes to M365 audit and investigation, the “Unified Audit Log” (UAL) is your friend. It can be surly, obstinate, and wholly inadequate, but your friend […]

The post Wrangling the M365 UAL with PowerShell and SOF-ELK (Part 1 of 3) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Troy Wojewoda // In honor of Shark Week1, I decided to write this blog to demonstrate various techniques I’ve found useful when analyzing network traffic with Wireshark, as well as […]

The post Welcome to Shark Week: A Guide for Getting Started with Wireshark and TShark appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Tom Smith // At Black Hills Information Security (BHIS), we deal with all manner of clients, public and private. Until a month or two ago, though, we’d never dealt with […]

The post Why Do Car Dealers Need Cybersecurity Services?  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

rvrsh3ll //  Introduction  This blog post is intended to give a light overview of device codes, access tokens, and refresh tokens. Here, I focus on the technical how-to for standing […]

The post Dynamic Device Code Phishing  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Derek Banks // Living Off the Land Binaries, Scripts, and Libraries, known as LOLBins or LOLBAS, are legitimate components of an operating system that threat actors can use to achieve […]

The post Ssh… Don’t Tell Them I Am Not HTTPS: How Attackers Use SSH.exe as a Backdoor Into Your Network appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Hal Denton // Have you ever been given an encrypted hard drive to perform forensic analysis on? What could go wrong? Probably the first thought rolling through your mind is […]

The post Who’s Bootin’? Dissecting the Master Boot Record appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..