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The Vertex Project

Happy New Year from the Vertex Project! 🎉
First of all, thank you. We are so thankful for your feedback and engagement inside the Synapse Slack community. Many of the improvements we made to Synapse in 2021 were driven by customer and community requests or suggestions. Thanks to you, our community and online following also doubled in size. 

Our focus for 2022 is to design better analyst experiences, offer more learning resources, release new Power-Ups, and continue to optimize the workflows for capturing assessments and sharing actionable intelligence.

🧐 Looking back at 2021

Here’s a recap of what we've done, so far, to reach these goals:
Data Model Additions
Storm Language Advancements
Synapse UI Enhancements
New Synapse Power-Ups
Our Growing Community & Learning Resources
✨ Data Model Additions
The Synapse data model is ever growing to allow us to incorporate different analytical disciplines as part of the holistic intelligence analysis process. This year brought us a slew of new types, enhancing your ability to model strategic assessments, capture cryptocurrency details, analyze industry targeting trends, and incorporate additional industry standards.
With analysts facing a continued rise in ransomware attacks, a flood of cryptocurrency mining malware, NFT-based money laundering, and the need to cluster threat activity based on cryptocurrency indicators, this last year saw an explosion of the model’s ability to represent the gritty details of cryptocurrency transactions, payments, smart contracts, and of course, NFTs.
To facilitate strategic planning and impact analysis, the model was updated to capture the effects of a compromise event with properties such as PII loss, ransom payments, and remediation costs. The compromise can be tied to individual contributing attacks. Both attacks and compromises may be then associated with specific threat actor goals and campaigns.
To help you automate DFIR case management, kick off RFIs, or even tie their research to JIRA tickets, the model was updated to include a full suite of project management node types. We’ve even heard rumors of analysts using the Synapse-Jira Power-Up to automate pushing ticket status updates back into JIRA. 😉
Finally, to throw a life-line to the often overlooked vulnerability management analysts, we added support for several standards related to vulnerability tracking and software version management: CWE, CPE, and CVSS. Combined with the existing support for CVEs, hosts, and software versions, the model now allows you to close the loop on vulnerability management and asset tracking. Now you can also use Synapse to provide immediate situational awareness of vulnerable systems and infrastructure.
💥 Storm Language Advancements
In the last year, the Storm query language has gone from light-weight scripting to a robust  language capable of heavy lifting without breaking any existing queries. We’ve added several features to help you (and us) quickly implement new capabilities in pure Storm so they can be easily deployed. By eating our own dog food, we also found and fixed a few “edge cases” (ok, they were bugs).
Let’s face it, string manipulation is essential but boring. 😀 So, we added several helpers to help you slice and dice strings. And of course, what language would be complete without letting you write amazing (and terrible) regular expressions and use them to match and extract data from raw text?
Once again proving Zawinski's Law, we added support for SMTP and IMAP protocols so you can send and receive emails directly from Storm. We also extended our Storm HTTP client support to include OAuth, websockets, and retrieving and processing large files. On the data parsing front, we added native support for YAML and XML files, not to mention a whole host of mime-specific dissectors for Synapse-Fileparser.
Finally, continuing the trend of adding support for industry standards, we implemented libraries to calculate CVSS score values and export and import data in the STIX format. We focused on hitting a sweet spot that allows many simple use cases to “just work” but also provides flexibility to deal with the myriad flavors and interpretations of STIX data.
🔥 Synapse UI Enhancements
By far, the most visible progress of 2021 was in the Synapse UI. 😉
The powerful fork and merge capabilities provided by Synapse were promoted to the always-visible Top Bar. Now you can easily create a new scratch-space, share it with your teammates, review each other's changes, and merge changes into production from anywhere.
Being able to review the history of a node is often critical to your ability to verify previous work. By directly integrating Synapse-Metrics, you can view historical changes and know who to praise (or blame) for every change.
Keeping your reporting data-driven, easy to update, and closely tied to the raw data sources is a huge challenge. We created the Stories Tool to enable analyst-authored prose combined with embedded data visualizations to be easily updated and exported to PDF for delivery to customers or pointy haired bosses. Stories were also expanded to include templates so you can easily generate reports in a standard format for things like malware families and threat groups. But can you specify your own cornflower blue colors and fonts? Of course you can…
The Power-Ups Tool was implemented to allow you to peruse the available Power-Ups, install and update them with 1 click, and display documentation on how to make the most of them. Power-Ups to the people!
Finally, to support single sign-on requirements, we implemented support for OAuth2.0 and SAML allowing admins to control access using, for example, Azure Active Directory or OKTA. This lets you use your existing sign-on session to automatically login to the Synapse UI without requiring you to remember yet another password.
⚡ New Synapse Power-Ups
In 2021, we developed 25 new Rapid Power-Ups to allow analysts to automatically ingest and enrich data using their favorite third-party APIs. Additionally, in an effort to minimize the devops effort necessary to support your Synapse Enterprise deployment, we ported seven previously Advanced Power-Ups (which required docker containers and devops to deploy) to Rapid Power-Ups that can be installed with just one click!
📚 More Learning Resources

Everyone here at The Vertex Project is passionate about educating users through blog posts, webinars, and learning resources like the APT1 Scavenger Hunt. Take a look at some of 2021’s Synapse learning highlights:
We offered Synapse 101 a total of 16 times.
We hosted 9 What’s New webinars which you can now watch on our YouTube channel.
Over 110 people participated in the APT1 Scavenger Hunt.

🥅  Our goals for 2022

We hear you! Ease of use, visual workflows, and more Power-Ups are our top priorities for 2022. We’ve got lots of exciting plans (too many to list) but here are a few things coming soon...
🛠️ Visual Ingest Tool

On this one, our UX folks have outdone themselves… Using the Visual Ingest Tool, you’ll be able to read PDFs (or HTML pages captured as PDFs) which automatically highlight indicators and allow you to add tags directly from the PDF view. For types that can’t be easily matched, like org names, you will be able to highlight text in the PDF and extract that value as a specified node type. All extracted nodes will be linked back to a node representing the report where you can record things like title, publication date, author, and original URLs.

🆕 Workflows for Power-Ups
It’s always dubious when someone lists having “created a framework” as a new feature, but this time it’s true! We’re coming down the home stretch on Synapse UI workflows which allow Power-Ups to add task-specific visualizations. This means:
Node actions (via r-click) will take input via dialogs
Query interfaces (like Synapse-Shodan) will let you review data
Power-Ups will be configured via dialogs rather than command line tools
You’ll be able to implement your own visual workflows to streamline tasks
We’ve even given early access to a few customers and have been impressed by the custom Workflows they have created to streamline their work! All the modularity of Power-Ups, with less added typing!
🆒 Synapse-Search + Storm Lookup Mode
We’re working to integrate Synapse-Search and it’s powerful full-text indexing with Storm Lookup Mode to allow you to seamlessly lift nodes using syntax-free text search. So you’ll soon be able to use free-form text search directly from the Storm query bar!
🚀 Moar Power-Ups
Too many to name them all…really! The list includes Synapse-Mandiant, Synapse-Splunk, Synapse-Intezer, and Synapse-GitHub, just to name a few. 

From all of us at Vertex, thank you for your support. 💚

Wishing you a happy, safe, and healthy 2022.

<div class="mirror-content" data-reactroot=""><img alt="Image" class="image" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/TyHNkgJ4LclJsGkXloA8PjDWeBZF-676g0wihtsLjcMoSOuqLaeBFn6H9otr5rwfEi79ON-Hf7gYPQ3qlI8wEyLq9mSkVv6CYOn5fYr6NpllJKEtBKoP1lcAMLVb-yWZL4vgDMt8" style="display:block;max-width:100%;max-height:100%;margin:24px auto"/>​ Happy New Year from the Vertex Project! 🎉​First of all, thank you. We are so thankful for your feedback and engagement inside the<a href="https://v.vtx.lk/slack-invite" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener"> </a><a href="https://v.vtx.lk/slack-invite" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">Synapse Slack</a> community. Many of the improvements we made to Synapse in 2021 were driven by customer and community requests or suggestions. Thanks to you, our community and online following also doubled in size. Our focus for 2022 is to design better analyst experiences, offer more learning resources, release new Power-Ups, and continue to optimize the workflows for capturing assessments and sharing actionable intelligence.<hr/>​🧐 Looking back at 2021 Here’s a recap of what we&#x27;ve done, so far, to reach these goals:<ul><li>​Data Model Additions</li><li>​Storm Language Advancements</li><li>​Synapse UI Enhancements</li><li>​New Synapse Power-Ups</li><li>​Our Growing Community &amp; Learning Resources</li></ul>​✨ Data Model Additions​The Synapse data model is ever growing to allow us to incorporate different analytical disciplines as part of the holistic intelligence analysis process. This year brought us a slew of new types, enhancing your ability to model strategic assessments, capture cryptocurrency details, analyze industry targeting trends, and incorporate additional industry standards.​With analysts facing a continued rise in ransomware attacks, a flood of cryptocurrency mining malware, NFT-based money laundering, and the need to cluster threat activity based on cryptocurrency indicators, this last year saw an explosion of the model’s ability to represent the gritty details of cryptocurrency transactions, payments, smart contracts, and of course, NFTs.​To facilitate strategic planning and impact analysis, the model was updated to capture the effects of a compromise event with properties such as PII loss, ransom payments, and remediation costs. The compromise can be tied to individual contributing attacks. Both attacks and compromises may be then associated with specific threat actor goals and campaigns.​To help you automate DFIR case management, kick off RFIs, or even tie their research to JIRA tickets, the model was updated to include a full suite of project management node types. We’ve even heard rumors of analysts using the Synapse-Jira Power-Up to automate pushing ticket status updates back into JIRA. 😉​Finally, to throw a life-line to the often overlooked vulnerability management analysts, we added support for several standards related to vulnerability tracking and software version management: CWE, CPE, and CVSS. Combined with the existing support for CVEs, hosts, and software versions, the model now allows you to close the loop on vulnerability management and asset tracking. Now you can also use Synapse to provide immediate situational awareness of vulnerable systems and infrastructure.​💥 Storm Language Advancements​In the last year, the Storm query language has gone from light-weight scripting to a robust  language capable of heavy lifting without breaking any existing queries. We’ve added several features to help you (and us) quickly implement new capabilities in pure Storm so they can be easily deployed. By eating our own dog food, we also found and fixed a few “edge cases” (ok, they were bugs).​Let’s face it, string manipulation is essential but boring. 😀 So, we added several helpers to help you slice and dice strings. And of course, what language would be complete without letting you write amazing (and terrible) regular expressions and use them to match and extract data from raw text?​Once again proving Zawinski&#x27;s Law, we added support for SMTP and IMAP protocols so you can send and receive emails directly from Storm. We also extended our Storm HTTP client support to include OAuth, websockets, and retrieving and processing large files. On the data parsing front, we added native support for YAML and XML files, not to mention a whole host of <a href="https://synapse.docs.vertex.link/projects/fileparser/en/latest/fileparser/formats.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mime-specific dissectors</a> for Synapse-Fileparser.​Finally, continuing the trend of adding support for industry standards, we implemented libraries to calculate CVSS score values and export and import data in the STIX format. We focused on hitting a sweet spot that allows many simple use cases to “just work” but also provides flexibility to deal with the myriad flavors and interpretations of STIX data.​🔥 Synapse UI Enhancements​By far, the most visible progress of 2021 was in the Synapse UI. 😉​The powerful fork and merge capabilities provided by Synapse were promoted to the always-visible Top Bar. Now you can easily create a new scratch-space, share it with your teammates, review each other&#x27;s changes, and merge changes into production from anywhere.​Being able to review the history of a node is often critical to your ability to verify previous work. By directly integrating Synapse-Metrics, you can view historical changes and know who to praise (or blame) for every change.​Keeping your reporting data-driven, easy to update, and closely tied to the raw data sources is a huge challenge. We created the Stories Tool to enable analyst-authored prose combined with embedded data visualizations to be easily updated and exported to PDF for delivery to customers or pointy haired bosses. Stories were also expanded to include templates so you can easily generate reports in a standard format for things like malware families and threat groups. But can you specify your own cornflower blue colors and fonts? Of course you can…​The Power-Ups Tool was implemented to allow you to peruse the available Power-Ups, install and update them with 1 click, and display documentation on how to make the most of them. Power-Ups to the people!​Finally, to support single sign-on requirements, we implemented support for OAuth2.0 and SAML allowing admins to control access using, for example, Azure Active Directory or OKTA. This lets you use your existing sign-on session to automatically login to the Synapse UI without requiring you to remember yet another password.​⚡ New Synapse Power-Ups​In 2021, we developed <a href="https://docsend.com/view/mbf75xhywy4y2mpk" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">25 new Rapid Power-Ups</a> to allow analysts to automatically ingest and enrich data using their favorite third-party APIs. Additionally, in an effort to minimize the devops effort necessary to support your Synapse Enterprise deployment, we ported seven previously Advanced Power-Ups (which required docker containers and devops to deploy) to Rapid Power-Ups that can be installed with just one click!​📚 More Learning Resources Everyone here at The Vertex Project is passionate about educating users through blog posts, webinars, and learning resources like the<a href="https://docsend.com/view/twcnmfb89xhyc27h" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener"> </a><a href="https://docsend.com/view/twcnmfb89xhyc27h" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">APT1 Scavenger Hunt</a>. Take a look at some of 2021’s Synapse learning highlights:<ul><li>​We offered <a href="https://v.vtx.lk/luma" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">Synapse 101</a> a total of 16 times.</li><li>​We hosted 9 What’s New webinars which you can now watch on<a href="https://v.vtx.lk/youtube" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener"> our YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>​Over 110 people participated in the APT1 Scavenger Hunt.</li></ul><hr/>​🥅 Our goals for 2022 We hear you! Ease of use, visual workflows, and more Power-Ups are our top priorities for 2022. We’ve got lots of exciting plans (too many to list) but here are a few things coming soon...​🛠️ Visual Ingest Tool On this one, our UX folks have outdone themselves… Using the Visual Ingest Tool, you’ll be able to read PDFs (or HTML pages captured as PDFs) which automatically highlight indicators and allow you to add tags directly from the PDF view. For types that can’t be easily matched, like org names, you will be able to highlight text in the PDF and extract that value as a specified node type. All extracted nodes will be linked back to a node representing the report where you can record things like title, publication date, author, and original URLs. 🆕 Workflows for Power-Ups​It’s always dubious when someone lists having “created a framework” as a new feature, but this time it’s true! We’re coming down the home stretch on Synapse UI workflows which allow Power-Ups to add task-specific visualizations. This means:<ul><li>​Node actions (via r-click) will take input via dialogs</li><li>​Query interfaces (like Synapse-Shodan) will let you review data</li><li>​Power-Ups will be configured via dialogs rather than command line tools</li><li>​You’ll be able to implement your own visual workflows to streamline tasks</li></ul>​We’ve even given early access to a few customers and have been impressed by the custom Workflows they have created to streamline their work! All the modularity of Power-Ups, with less added typing!​🆒 Synapse-Search + Storm Lookup Mode​We’re working to integrate Synapse-Search and it’s powerful full-text indexing with Storm Lookup Mode to allow you to seamlessly lift nodes using syntax-free text search. So you’ll soon be able to use free-form text search directly from the Storm query bar!​🚀 Moar Power-Ups​Too many to name them all…really! The list includes Synapse-Mandiant, Synapse-Splunk, Synapse-Intezer, and Synapse-GitHub, just to name a few. <hr/>​From all of us at Vertex, thank you for your support. 💚 Wishing you a happy, safe, and healthy 2022.</div>

Psst! Here's what's in store for 2022