KnowBe4 PhishER/PhishER Plus vs. Splunk Enterprise Security

PhishER comes with some good features, such as PhishML, PhishRIP, PhishFlip, etc. These features help us manage phishing email reporting incidents. From reporting emails via Phish Alert Button plug-in to collecting all reported emails in one place at the PhishER dashboard. Now, the PhishML comes into play, scanning all reported emails and tagging each as clean, spam, or threat. With the help of this machine learning-based algorithm, our investigation process becomes easier. Other features, such as PhishRip, help to search and quarantine phishing emails, and PhishFlip converts a real phishing campaign to a test phishing campaign.

Incentivized

Well-Suited Scenarios:

Real-Time Threat Response: ES excels in swiftly detecting and responding to security threats through data correlation.

Compliance Management: ES streamlines compliance with detailed logs and reports, ideal for regulated industries.

User Behavior Analytics: Effective in monitoring user and entity behavior, particularly for insider threat detection.

Large-Scale Environments: Valuable for organizations with diverse data sources and high volumes of data.

Incident Investigation: ES aids in post-incident analysis, reconstructing events to understand root causes.

Less Appropriate Scenarios:

Smaller Organizations: For simpler setups, ES may be complex and costly.

Static Environments: In low-risk settings, ES's advanced features may be unnecessary.

Limited Resources: Tight budgets or sparse IT resources may hinder effective ES use.

Lack of In-House Expertise: Without security experts, optimizing ES can be challenging.

Budget Constraints: ES may be cost-prohibitive for budget-conscious organizations, prompting consideration of more affordable alternatives.

Incentivized

• Well structured KMSAT, PAB is a great addition.
• Good Training Library, ability to customize templates
• Phish/ER opens a windows to types & volume of suspect emails and allows admins to act upon.
• "Rooms" in Phish/ER, to me, is considered my entry point to start my admin duties.
• PAB and Phish/ER work very well together.
• KnowBe4 Learner App is a great addition.

Incentivized

• Its best feature is its user interface, which is easy to navigate and understand. All you need is a little tutorial on how to use the Splunk query language and you're done.
• Logs can be easily uploaded or shared across multiple platforms and display a highly insightful graphical representations of data using graphs, tables, and many other formats.

Incentivized

• Issues with Global Blocklist
• Email Template Modification - Simplification
• Target Specific Users vs. Groups
• PhishRIP info tabs (i.e. if improperly check ripped emails are turned into tests. This has caused issues.) Info tabs or markers allow user to hover and get more information about what action a check box or slider provides.

Incentivized

• To identify User Behaviour analysis is lacking component which we get in Splunk UBA.
• The documentation part is hard to work on because if the new user tries to learn ES then the documentation is not user-friendly.
• ES must ass more Knowledge objects by default to make security-related aspects more reliable and enhance the details.

Incentivized

When we first discovered that KnowBe4 released something like this, we saw a demo of it and were floored at what it could do and how it could help us from a security standpoint. Gone are the days of us in IT sending out a mass email saying please don't click on anything in the email from sender "X", and it allows us to quietly and easily ensure that people don't take any action on malicious emails.

Incentivized

We are very happy with Splunk and would advise anyone to take a serious look at it. It might look pricey but the rewards Splunk offers seem endless.

Incentivized

I think that the system is well designed and makes it easy to fine phishing emails that have been reported. It also has a simple user interface that allows you to review and address threat emails also providing an automated component that allows for automated threat mitigation and customized feedback responses to users

Incentivized

You definitely need to learn how to use Splunk to get the most of the tool. There are many courses available for free to get up to speed on the usability of the tool but it's not that simple. It will take time to digest all the data and to understand how to query for what you are looking for.

Incentivized

I'm not an ES user, but, in my implementation I usually try to prevent all service stops to guarantee High availability to the final customers.

Incentivized

ES requires a very performant infrastructure: if it has it's performant, otherwise not. I had situation with a very performant infrastructure and I didn't notized that it was a distributed architecture, it seemed that there ware few data on my PC, othewise I experienced less performant infrastructures with less performaces.

Incentivized

Responses to questions were answered quickly and accurately.

It's good when it's responsive, but I've had times where I had to wait quite a while for a response. But these are typically the exceptions rather than the rule. When you do get a response it is always well-informed and appropriate. I would say they've been trending better over time with this.

Incentivized

I experienced only on-line training, but the trainers were very professional and competent. Maybe it could be more useful if they also have an experience in projects because sometimes they didn't have a real project experience to communicate to the students. Anyway, it was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself, aven if I have more than 10 years of Splunk activity experience.

Incentivized

It was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself. The only problem was that, when I worked with the Splunk Professional Services, I found some difference between the training contents and the information from PS. In addition is required a long experience on Splunk Enterprise for the data ingestion part, in other words I'm able to work with ES because I'm worling on Splunk since 11 years, otherwise I'd some problem.

Incentivized

It was very simple to implement - with just a few settings needed to connect it to our O365 environment

Incentivized

It's a fantatic product and it was very useful the presence of Splunk Professional Services for the Design Phase and the final Health Check.

Incentivized

We evaluated the Titan options because we have already used their DNS filtering product. However, KnowBe4 came in with a better price per user and a significantly stronger product lineup, particularly with its security awareness training component.

Incentivized

LogRhythm is good for a team comprising mostly non-technical IT users. Unlike Splunk, it has a GUI log search and a good ticketing system. Splunk is better than Logrhythm for me as it provides me with the ultimate flexibility to write custom queries. Scalyr is a good tool and quite frankly lot faster than Splunk. However, I prefer Splunk because of its better Dashboards and panel customization abilities. Elastic is another amazing tool. It is hard to choose between the two especially because both have different sets of logs on them. I use both. Elastic for internal server logs, Splunk for everything else.

Incentivized

We have on prem splunk and it’s mostly east to setup, but we have issues keeping data separated between customer splunk deployments while at the same time only having to look at one SIEM to address events in every environment

Incentivized

• There has been a 700% increase in emails being reported now. Previously, staff were only reporting 4 emails a month. It is easier for us to promote the phish alert button, receive automated remediation and rapidly respond.
• We had no reports on the amount of phishing emails were coming through Mimecast but now we have reports for the board of trustees.
• Every Wednesday we talk about cyber security to all staff, PhishER allows us to point out the trend and what to look out for which raises awareness. Never before were we able to talk about cyber security like this.

Incentivized

• We have a 100% success rate on all our ES implementations due to the amazing documentation and Splunk enablement on the subject.
• Our Splunk ES business has grown 100% YoY for the last 3 years.
• In terms of long term management and maintenance, ES has been highly stable and predictable, reducing our overhead on costly services team for ad hoc maintenance work.