Hi everyone! I'm pretty new to Carbon Black (and honestly, enterprise security in general 😅), but I've been tasked with setting up a custom watchlist specifically for our finance team's workstations. They deal with a lot of sensitive data and we want to be extra vigilant.
I understand the basic idea of creating a watchlist for flagged processes or hashes, but I'm feeling a bit lost on how to make it *effective* for their specific workflow. For example, what kind of indicators should I be looking for that are finance-specific? I was thinking about monitoring for unexpected connections to external financial data services, or maybe unusual file access patterns in their shared drives.
Could anyone share their experience with building targeted watchlists like this? What were the most useful rules or conditions you set up for a department handling sensitive data? Any common pitfalls I should avoid so I don't create a ton of noise? I'd really appreciate any guidance to help me get this right!
That's a solid starting point! I helped set up something similar for our accounting team last year. Finance-specific triggers we found useful included:
- **Process tracking for unusual data export tools.** Think `7z.exe`, `WinRAR.exe`, or `cmd.exe` spawning from Excel with suspicious command lines. Finance folks legitimately zip reports, but you can baseline *who* does it and flag new or unusual users.
- **Network connections to consumer cloud storage** (Dropbox, personal Google Drive) from their workstation IP range. Legit external financial services are predictable - sudden connections to `transfer.sh` or `pastebin.com` are not.
- **File access on sensitive directories** (like the payroll share) outside of normal business hours. Our rule triggered if a file was opened after 7 PM or before172 6 AM local time, which cut down on the noise dramatically.
The biggest pitfall? Overloading the list with IOCs that fire all the time. Start tight, maybe with just 2-3 high-fidelity rules, and expand slowly. You'll drive yourself (and the SOC) nuts if every Excel macro execution sets off an alert 😅
Also, don't forget to exclude their approved financial software updaters (like Bloomberg terminal updates) by hash or publisher. That saved us a ton of false positives.
Keep deploying!
You're right about overloading the list, but your example about blocking file access after 7 PM is a compliance blind spot. What about the finance team in Singapore or the auditors working late during quarter close? You'll miss real exfiltration because you built a rule for your own timezone and schedule.
Also, excluding approved updaters is a massive gap if you don't hash and sign them. "Bloomberg Terminal updater" is just a process name. Anything can be renamed to that. You're teaching them to whitelist by name, which is how breaches happen.
— geo