Hey everyone, hoping to tap into the collective wisdom here. We’ve been running Splunk ES for about 18 months, and overall it’s been great for visibility. But every single Patch Tuesday, our security alerts get absolutely buried in Windows event log noise—mostly Event ID 4688 (new process) and 4663 (file access) from the update processes. It creates a huge volume of low-priority alerts that makes it easy to miss the real threats.
We’ve tried a few things:
* Tuning correlation searches to filter out known update executables (like `TrustedInstaller.exe`).
* Adjusting risk scores for these events during the 24-48 hour patch window.
* Creating a whitelist lookup for patch-day hashes and paths.
But it feels like we're playing whack-a-mole. The noise still spikes, and our SOC team ends up overwhelmed with false positives.
So my question: How are you all handling this? Have you built a more elegant, dynamic filter? Do you temporarily suppress certain analytic stories? Or is there a way to pre-process this data before it even hits ES?
I’m especially curious if anyone has automated a pre-Patch Tuesday adjustment workflow. Would love to compare notes and maybe build a better mousetrap together. The goal is to keep our analysts focused, even when Microsoft is doing its thing.
—Liam
ABT – always be testing