Splunk Attack Analyzer: Use Cases, Features, and Limitations [2025]

What Is Splunk Attack Analyzer? 

Splunk Attack Analyzer is a threat analysis solution that automatically examines complex cyber threats, including credential phishing and malware. It enables security analysts to automate the analysis process by emulating the full execution of an attack chain. This includes opening attachments, interacting with embedded files, navigating archives, and following links.

Splunk Attack Analyzer provides contextual insights into how threats behave in real-world environments. It removes the manual burden of tracing attack steps and correlating data, offering visualizations of the threat’s behavior. These capabilities allow security operations centers (SOCs) to detect and respond to threats more quickly and accurately.

By integrating with Splunk SOAR, the Analyzer extends its capabilities into a broader security automation ecosystem. Together, these tools fully automate the process from threat detection to response, helping organizations reduce response time and maintain operational efficiency.

This is part of a series of articles about Splunk SIEM

Splunk Attack Analyzer Use Cases 

Splunk Attack Analyzer aims to address several challenges in security operations. Here are key use cases that illustrate how organizations can apply the tool.

SOC Triage Processes

Security operations centers (SOCs) often struggle with inconsistencies in how different analysts triage threats. Splunk Attack Analyzer addresses this by providing a standardized method for submitting and analyzing suspicious data. 

Whether submitted manually or via API, all resources undergo the same automated processing pipeline. This ensures that each incident is evaluated using consistent logic and scoring, reducing variability between analysts and improving the reliability of threat triage outcomes.

Incident Review and Analysis

Analysts frequently rely on multiple tools when investigating threats, which can lead to fragmented findings and inconsistent conclusions. Splunk Attack Analyzer consolidates threat data within a single platform, eliminating the need to correlate findings across disparate systems. 

It applies unified analysis procedures to every submission, allowing teams to extract and interpret key threat indicators more efficiently. This standardization simplifies decision-making and frees analysts to focus on high-priority incidents.

Automation of User-Reported Phishing

The rise in phishing awareness has led to a surge in user-reported emails. While this supports proactive security, it also increases the workload on analysts. Splunk Attack Analyzer integrates with email systems to automate the processing of reported phishing attempts. 

Its email gateway ingests suspicious emails, analyzes attachments and embedded links, and extracts actionable intelligence—without requiring analysts to interact directly with potentially harmful content. This automation allows teams to scale their response while minimizing risk.

Key Features of Splunk Attack Analyzer 

Splunk Attack Analyzer helps security teams investigate and respond to threats quickly, accurately, and safely. It automates the entire analysis workflow, reduces manual work, and provides a deep technical understanding of how attacks unfold. Here are the core features:

• Full attack chain execution: Automatically simulates the entire sequence of a threat’s behavior, including opening attachments, decoding QR codes, and following embedded links or passwords, to uncover the final payload.
• Detailed threat forensics and visualization: Provides analysts with a real-time, step-by-step visualization of how threats operate, along with access to all technical artifacts involved in the attack.
• Safe access to malicious content: Allows analysts to investigate suspicious files, URLs, and emails in isolated, non-attributable environments—eliminating the risk to the analyst or organization.
• Integration with Splunk SOAR: Enables fully automated detection and response workflows by feeding verified threat data into SOAR playbooks for fast and consistent remediation.
• Layered detection for phishing and malware: Uses multiple detection techniques to accurately identify both credential phishing and malware-based threats.
• API access: Offers an API for integrating threat intelligence and analysis results into other tools and platforms within the security stack.
• Scalable and consistent analysis: Supports large-scale SOC operations with consistent, high-quality results—assisting analysts of various tiers and reducing the need for escalations.

Splunk Attack Analyzer Components 

Splunk Attack Analyzer is composed of several modular components that work together to detect threats and generate forensic insights. 

Resource: A resource refers to any item submitted for analysis, such as a file, URL, or email. During the analysis process, additional resources might be discovered—like embedded links or files—and added to the original submission for further analysis.
Job: When a resource is submitted, it initiates a job. This job includes the entire analysis process for the original and any newly discovered resources. Each job is uniquely identified by a job ID and results in a consolidated set of forensic findings once complete.
Engine: An engine is a dedicated microservice responsible for processing a type of analysis task. A job can involve multiple engines, each focusing on different areas—such as checking a URL’s reputation against external services. Engines perform specialized analysis and can process resources concurrently.
Task: Each engine’s execution for a given resource is called a task. Tasks generate summary results and often produce normalized forensic data. Each task is uniquely identified and can be traced independently within a job.
Normalized forensics: This is structured output created by converting raw engine results into a consistent format used by Splunk Attack Analyzer. Normalized data helps standardize how findings are interpreted across different types of engines.
Raw forensics: Raw forensics are the unprocessed results returned directly from each engine. While some of this data is mapped to the normalized format, it may include engine-specific fields or structures that remain unchanged.
Score: Some engines assign a score to their findings based on the severity and confidence of detections. These scores range from 0 to 100 and help quantify the threat level—0 indicating benign, and 100 indicating high maliciousness. Scores are color-coded: green (0–49), yellow (50–74), and red (75–100). The task with the highest score determines the job’s overall threat score.

Limitations of Splunk Attack Analyzer 

While Splunk Attack Analyzer offers a useful set of features, there are several limitations to consider. These limitations were sourced from the Splunk documentation or reported by users on Peerspot:

• Limited support availability: Technical support for Splunk Attack Analyzer is available only during business hours, Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Pacific Time, excluding public and Splunk holidays. This could be a constraint for organizations requiring 24/7 support, especially during critical incidents.
• Integration requirements for third-party engines: While Splunk Attack Analyzer integrates with various third-party analysis engines (e.g., VirusTotal, Cisco SMA, FalconX), these integrations require users to provide their own API keys and credentials. This setup can add complexity and may require additional licensing or subscriptions.
• Dependency on cloud infrastructure: As a cloud-based application, Splunk Attack Analyzer’s performance and availability are dependent on internet connectivity and cloud service stability. Organizations with strict data residency requirements or limited internet access may face challenges in deploying this solution. ​
• Resource requirements for optimal performance: To fully leverage Splunk Attack Analyzer’s capabilities, organizations may need to invest in additional infrastructure or resources, such as configuring integrations with other Splunk products (e.g., Splunk SOAR) and ensuring sufficient compute capacity for sandbox analyses. ​
• Limited market adoption: Compared to other security incident response solutions, Splunk Attack Analyzer has a smaller market share. This could imply a smaller user community and potentially fewer shared resources or community-driven support options.

Organizations should weigh these limitations against their requirements and resources when considering the implementation of Splunk Attack Analyzer.

Exabeam: Ultimate Splunk Attack Analyzer Alternative

Exabeam is a leading provider of security information and event management (SIEM) solutions, combining UEBA, SIEM, SOAR, and TDIR to accelerate security operations. Its Security Operations platforms enables security teams to quickly detect, investigate, and respond to threats while enhancing operational efficiency.

Key Features:

1. Scalable log collection and management: The open platform accelerates log onboarding by 70%, eliminating the need for advanced engineering skills while ensuring seamless log aggregation across hybrid environments.
2. Behavioral analytics: Uses advanced analytics to baseline normal vs. abnormal behavior, detecting insider threats, lateral movement, and advanced attacks missed by signature-based systems. Customers report that Exabeam helps detect and respond to 90% of attacks before other vendors can catch them.
3. Automated threat response: Simplifies security operations by automating incident timelines, reducing manual effort by 30%, and accelerating investigation times by 80%.
4. Contextual incident investigation: Since Exabeam automates timeline creation and reduces time spent on menial tasks, it cuts the time to detect and respond to threats by over 50%. Pre-built correlation rules, anomaly detection models, and vendor integrations reduce alerts by 60%, minimizing false positives.
5. SaaS and cloud-native options: Flexible deployment options provide scalability for cloud-first and hybrid environments, ensuring rapid time to value for customers. For organizations who can’t, or won’t move their SIEM to the cloud, Exabeam provides a market-leading, full featured, and self-hosted SIEM.
6. Network visibility with NetMon: Delivers deep insight beyond firewalls and IDS/IPS, detecting threats like data theft and botnet activity while making investigation easier with flexible searching. Deep Packet Analytics (DPA) also builds on the NetMon Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine to interpret key indicators of compromise (IOCs).

Additionally, here are three compelling reasons why organizations would either switch from Splunk to Exabeam, or choose to use New-Scale Analytics from Exabeam alongside their existing Splunk deployment:

• Cost-Effective Scalability with Transparent Pricing
  Splunk’s pricing is often tied to data ingestion volume, leading to high and unpredictable costs as organizations scale. Exabeam offers more predictable, flat-fee pricing models—especially with New-Scale Analytics—which decouple analytics from raw data storage. This allows organizations to scale their analytics and threat detection capabilities without being penalized for collecting more data.
• Behavioral Analytics and Automated Threat Detection
  Exabeam’s UEBA (User and Entity Behavior Analytics) and timeline-based investigation model automatically stitches together related events across users, assets, and sessions. This behavioral-centric approach helps detect lateral movement, credential misuse, and insider threats that are difficult to surface with correlation rules in Splunk alone. When integrated with Splunk, New-Scale Analytics delivers this context-rich detection without requiring a complete rip-and-replace.
• Accelerated Investigation and Response with Prebuilt Use Cases
  Exabeam offers out-of-the-box detection content mapped to MITRE ATT&CK and designed around real-world threat scenarios. These prebuilt use cases and automated playbooks dramatically reduce investigation time compared to building and tuning rules manually in Splunk. Organizations can use New-Scale Analytics to overlay these capabilities on their existing Splunk deployment, supercharging SOC efficiency without disrupting current workflows.

Overall, Exabeam customers consistently highlight how its real-time visibility, automation, and productivity tools powered by AI, uplevel security talent, transforming overwhelmed analysts into proactive defenders while reducing costs and maintaining industry-leading support.

Get a demo and see Exabeam in action