Create and delete training alerts in TheHive

TheHive is a scalable, open source and free Security Incident Response Platform, which tightly integrates with MISP. It supports a feature that allows you to convert one or more alerts, for example alerts sent by security devices, to a security case (an investigation). The creation, and handling, of these alerts can be done via an API.

Creating, and then afterwards deleting, these alerts to showcase the features of TheHive during a training session can beRead more.

RDP Honeypots

In a recent post the SANS ISC warned of an increase in RDP Scanning. Although the initially reported number was adjusted downward later, there is still an increase in exposed RDP servers. It would be interesting to track the volume of RDP scans, and the credentials used in the scan. Let’s run an RDP honeypot.

One of these RDP honeypots is written by Sylvain Peyrefitte, RDPY. RDPY is more than just a RDP honeypot. ItRead more.

Report sightings from Kibana to MISP

A problem we all face when using threat intelligence data is getting rid of false positives in our data feeds. On the other hand, reporting of true positives is equally important as it allows to increase the level of trust in an indicator.

I published a post on the NVISO blog, “Report sightings from Kibana to MISP“, which provides a solution for this problem.

COVID-19 Blocklists

A lot of good initiatives popped up recently to combat malicious activity related to the Corona pandemic.

A MISP instance for tracking COVID-19 activity; A list of domains which provides legitimate COVID-19 services; The Slack channel of COVID19 Cyber Threat Coalition; The COVID-19 CTI League; Public MISP feed by DCSO; And a feed by 1984.sh; Threat reports by RiskIQ; A COVID-19 threat list by domaintools; The COVID-19 domain classifier by SANS; A MISP warning listRead more.

Integrating MISP and Cytomic Orion

Cytomic Orion is a solution for Threat Hunting & Incident Response, that speeds up the process of identification, investigation, containment, and remediation of cyber threats & insiders using Living-off-the-Land techniques to evade existing controls (Reduce the MTTD & MTTR). The Cytomic Orion API allows you to integrate it with other tools, one of those tools is MISP.

The integration with Cytomic Orion allows you to achieve two main goals :

Query the Cytomic Orion API,Read more.

Sysmon not logging all process creation events (Calculator and other sandboxed apps)

System Monitor or Sysmon is a Windows system service and device driver that provides event data on process creation, network connections and file alterations. It is one of the most powerful tools available for security monitoring and gives detailed insight on what is happening on an endpoint.

Sysmon can be started from the command line, with a specific set of modules and processes to monitor but will in most cases be installed as a serviceRead more.

Parse stored Windows Event logs with Security Onion

Security Onion is a free tool to monitor for suspicious activity in network events. I find it very easy to use, especially if you integrate the MISP threat data with the Bro -Zeek- intelligence framework. Besides investigating network events, you can also use it to analyze Windows Event logs, both from a live event stream and for analyzing stored Windows events.

Winlogbeat, part of Elastic, is the shipper that we will use to send theRead more.

Which Incident Response Investments Are You Prioritizing in 2020?

I published an article on the IBM SecurityIntelligence blog on to Which Incident Response Investments Are You Prioritizing in 2020?

The post describes that improving incident response plans should be the number one priority for future investment, but there are other pressing areas to consider as well. Invest in the Future of Digital Forensics, especially in light of further inclusion of cloud, BYOD and IoT related devices. Get Ready for Changes in Network Monitoring asRead more.

Iranian threat groups

In light of recent developments it would be a good idea to sketch a picture of the known Iranian threat groups. I used the information made available by MITRE ATT&CK.

Group5 is a threat group with a suspected Iranian nexus, though this attribution is not definite. The group has targeted individuals connected to the Syrian opposition via spearphishing and watering holes, normally using Syrian and Iranian themes. Group5 has used two commonly available remote accessRead more.

Use Sysmon DNS data for incident response

Recent versions of Sysmon support the logging of DNS queries. This is done via event ID 22 in Applications and Services Log > Microsoft > Windows > Sysmon Operational.

To enable DNS logging, you need to include the section DnsQuery in your Sysmon configuration file. For example via

Note that enabling DNS queries can be noisy. It’s best to apply filtering as proposed by the SwiftOnSecurity sysmon config file and, additionally, filter out the commonlyRead more.