New Tables Queried by Salesforce.com Peer Group

Impact:

Detecting first-time query attempts to sensitive tables by a peer group that has previously not accessed the tables in question, can help prove that individuals within the organization are not abusing or misusing legitimate access to assets that store and process personal data. This method is an industry best practice.

Specific to GDPR, this can be considered an effective security control, as required by Article 32. This is applicable to processing personal data from the controller, and needs to also be addressed if contractors or sub-processors from third countries or international organizations access and transfer personal data (Article 15).

Implementation of this example (or any of the First Time Seen examples) is generally very simple, though the peer group makes things slightly more complicated.

• Validate that you have the right data onboarded, and that the fields you want to monitor are properly extracted.
• Save the search.

To configure the Peer Group:

1. Start with a data source that gives you visibility into the peer group -- easiest is usually querying Active Directory via the SA-ldapsearch add-on, but you could get lists of users and their teams / departments / etc from any source you have.
2. Next you will need to convert that log source into a format that this lookup is expecting, which is as follows:

   user	peergroup (order not important)
   john	john|sarah
   sarah	john|sarah
   mark	mark

   The easiest way to do this is with a search like | inputlookup LDAPSearch.csv | stats values(user) as user by department | eval peergroup=mvjoin(user, "|") | mvexpand user

For most environments, these searches can be run once a day, often overnight, without worrying too much about a slow search. If you wish to run this search more frequently, or if this search is too slow for your environment, we recommend leveraging a lookup cache. For more on this, see the lookup cache dropdown below and select the sample item. A window will pop up telling you more about this feature.

This is a strictly behavioral search, so we define "false positive" slightly differently. Every time this fires, it will accurately reflect the first occurrence in the time period you're searching over (or for the lookup cache feature, the first occurrence over whatever time period you built the lookup). But while there are really no "false positives" in a traditional sense, there is definitely lots of noise.

You should not review these alerts directly (except for high sensitivity accounts), but instead use them for context, or to aggregate risk (as mentioned under How To Respond).

When this search returns values, initiate your incident response process and identify the user demonstrating this behavior. Capture the time of the event, the user's role, and tables queried. If possible, determine the system the user is using and its location. Contact the user and their manager to determine if it is authorized, and document that this is authorized and by whom. If not, the user credentials may have been used by another party and additional investigation is warranted.

New Tables Queried by Salesforce.com Peer Group Help

This is the generic search builder for First Seen Detection. Our dataset is an anonymized data collection from an actual customer environment.