Secure and share data is a critical element for all enterprises, including government entities. Myron Davis, analyst/programmer for the State of Alaska, joined John Furrier and Jeff Frick, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE’s Media team, at Splunk.conf 2015 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas to talk about how the State of Alaska is using Splunk Inc. to optimize its data.

Splunking it

Davis manages Alaska.gov, and he and his team apply Splunk to several different targeted projects. The site runs multiple Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and firewall systems under a SIM model, and Splunk’s Enterprise Security manages those systems. Davis also uses Splunk to retrieve what is now up to 200 million phone record requests.

While originally brought in for security, the flexibility of tool also allows Davis to redeploy Splunk to provide access to 15 different subagencies that share an infrastructure. Davis explained, “We need to spread out our information so that we can have shared access to the data, and that is what Splunk is doing for us right now.”

A hostage situation

When discussing security threats he has encountered, Davis discussed CryptoWall, one of the latest ransomware viruses. According to Davis, “CryptoWall runs through and encrypts all the local machine hardware and then it decides to crawl over the network and encrypt everything on the network.”

The virus essentially holds your data hostage, and then the ransom appears and advises you to pay in bitcoins to retrieve your data. Davis said that certain organizations have paid to get the data back. He goes on to say that the virus usually comes through email requests and that it is hard to train staff not to trust people.

‘Pre-munch’ talk

Davis also gave a talk at the conference regarding applying regular expressions to ACLs. “With Splunk, you don’t have the controls to do complex regular expressions on access control lists, and if you do it takes uses a lot of CPU power. My talk is about how to pre-munch your data so that it is ready for search filters in Splunk by using complex regular expressions,” said Davis.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Splunk .conf 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE