Constructing on the success of the twond annual Safety Operations Centre (SOC) at Cisco Stay Melbourne (Asia Pacific Japan) 2024, the manager group supported the primary SOC for Cisco Stay San Diego (Americas) and invited the group again for 20025. Planning a profitable SOC begins with a robust collaboration with the Community Operations Centre (NOC), which assigns a group of engineers to assemble the community within the weeks main as much as the convention.
Take a look at the CiscoTV interview of Shaun exterior the SOC.
The core missions of the SOC had been:
- Defend: Safeguard the community from threats and assaults, each inside and exterior
- Educate: Inform and interact attendees by means of SOC excursions and weblog content material
- Innovate: Develop and implement new integrations, processes, workflows, and automations
The SOC group labored diligently to detect, pinpoint, and help within the remediation of threats each time an attendee’s machine or account was recognized as compromised or insecure.


The SOC at Cisco Stay SOC was efficiently deployed in simply 12 hours over 1 ½ days, demonstrating in depth prior planning and specialised experience. This fast setup was enabled by a number of key elements
- The deployment of the “SOC in a Field,” a customized {hardware} answer refined by means of years of expertise on the RSAC Conventionenabling fast connectivity with the Cisco Stay NOC, Splunk Enterprise Safetyand the Cisco Safety Cloud.
- Drawing upon confirmed experience, workflows, and procedures from the RSAC 2025, Cisco Stay San Diegoand GovWare 2025 SOCs, with many veteran engineers offering each on-site deployment and devoted distant help. We additionally introduced in new SOC analysts for Tier 1 interns.
- Integrating superior improvements and safety practices developed whereas safeguarding the Black Hat community, acknowledged because the world’s most hostile surroundings.
- The partnership with Endacea extremely expert full-packet seize supplier, whose expertise within the 2025 SOC was crucial and prolonged to their dedication for Cisco Stay Melbourne.


The SOC Structure
The SOC group labored with the NOC to attach the ‘SOC within the Field’, Safe Entry digital home equipment for Area Title Service (DNS), and obtained a Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) of the community visitors.
The SOC group deployed the EndaceProbe packet seize platform to file all community visitors, enabling full investigation of any anomalous habits. The EndaceProbe platform additionally generated metadata (together with Zeek logs) into the Splunk Enterprise Safety Platform. File content material was reconstructed on the wire on the EndaceProbe, filtered, and streamed to Splunk Assault Analyzer (and on to Safe Malware Analytics) for sandboxing and evaluation.


The SOC group used Duo Central for Single Signal-On entry to the instruments, each on-premises and within the cloud, executing from the primary buyer expertise at Black Hat.


By leveraging cloud-based options like XDR and Splunk Cloudthis additionally minimized the quantity of labor that was wanted in a really tight setup window.
With the profitable fast deployment, we had time for group coaching on investigations and escalations to Tier 3 / incident responder and administration.


Configurations and different information had been already able to go from earlier occasions as properly, together with dashboards in Splunk, from the improvements of Ivan Berlinson.


Incidents had been investigated in XDR, with risk intelligence supplied by Cisco Talosand licenses donated byalphaMountain, Pulsedive, and StealthMoletogether with group sources.


Tier 3 consultants inside Splunk’s Menace Response group, devoted to safeguarding Splunk Cloud’s infrastructure, leveraged Splunk Enterprise Safetywith Incidents escalated from Cisco XDR by our Tier 1 & 2 analysts.
The Cloud Safety Suite was deployed to safe the SOC cloud infrastructure, together with Cisco Identification Intelligence.
The Statistics
Statistics are at all times a well-liked a part of the SOC Excursions. Beneath are the stats from this yr’s occasion.
| Attendees (Cisco Stay) | 6,200 |
| Whole packets captured (Endace) | 30.2 billion |
| Whole logs captured (Splunk) | 1.26 billion |
| Whole classes (Endace) | 256.7 million |
| Whole distinctive units (Firewall) | 7,539 |
| Whole packets written to disk (Endace) | 26.9 TBs |
| Whole logs written to cloud (Splunk) | 1.02 terabytes |
| Peak bandwidth utilization (Endace) | 3.76 Gbps |
| DNS Requests (Cisco) | 61.4 million / 938 blocked |
| Whole clear textual content username/passwords (Endace) | 1,525 |
| Distinctive units / accounts with clear textual content usernames / passwords (Endace) | 34 |
| Recordsdata despatched for malware evaluation (Endace) | 378k file objects reconstructed by Endace. 13,763 despatched to Splunk Assault Analyzer 2,914 despatched to Safe Malware Analytics |


SOC Findings and Classes Realized
The SOC group focuses on steady innovation and takes time to doc their experiences for the edification and schooling of the group.
Take a look at the blogs under from the engineers who labored contained in the SOC in Melbourne. For instance, Ryan MacLennan created an You may have a mannequin to seek out area generated algorithms on the Cisco Stay AMER Safety SOC. It will possibly run on the brand new ‘SOC in a Field’ GPUs on the UCS M8. Ryan gave the mannequin to Splunk Analysis, who printed for the group.
Acknowledgements
A heartfelt thanks to the engineers whose experience made the Cisco Stay Melbourne 2025 SOC an incredible success, successfully safeguarding the community and offering beneficial schooling to attendees.


Community Operations Middle Liaisons
- Freddy Bello, Andy Phillips, Chris Augulewicz and Scott Neuman
Cisco Safety and Splunk SOC Crew
- Innovation / Cloud Safety Suite: Ryan Maclennan
- Cisco Safety Integrations: Ivan Berlinson
- Splunk Integrations: Duane Waddle
- Splunk Incident Responder: Brendan Kuang
- Breachch Protectimon Suite: Robin Wei, Cam Dunn, Hannah Jabbor There
- Consumer Safety Suite: Justin Murphy and Jaki Hasan
- Firewall and Safety Cloud Management: Adam Kilgore and Apaar Sanghi
- Distant help: Ben Greenbaum
Endace SOC Crew
- Co-SOC Chief: Steve Fink
- Endace VP Product: Cary Wright
- Endace Engineering: Caleb Millar, Daniel Lawson and Peter Watt
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