Investigative Leads for Network Security Monitoring

When I worked incident response for Foundstone, my boss Kevin Mandia taught me about "investigative leads." This is a Bureau/law enforcement term for items which are recognized as important in a report but require additional scrutiny. I have several network security monitoring investigative leads which I have not yet had time to follow. I list them here in the event one or more of my readers have checked them out:

  • In November Dave Aitel of Immunity, Inc. posted an announcement of his company's CANVAS Reference Implementation (CRI). CANVAS is a penetration testing toolkit consisting of private exploits written by Immunity, Inc. The CRI is a subset of CANVAS, available for free under NDA, aimed at those wishing to test IDS and layer 7 firewalls (aka "IPS"). I plan to try this out soon, but don't expect public results due to the NDA.

  • There's an extended focus-ids thread discussing the need for packet capture and the problems of doing so in high bandwidth environments. Anyone who has seen my Amazon.com Wish List will notice I am researching hardware-based approaches to the problem, like network processors, FPGAs, and microcontrollers.

  • A friend pointed me to l7-filter, an "Application Layer Packet Classifier for Linux." This looks really cool. Along with the upcoming release of Snort 2.3 with integrated inline capabilities, I'm being forced to deploy one or more Linux boxes to try these features. If l7-filter is able to profile traffic running on arbitrary ports, it will give open-source-bound NSM analysts a powerful new capability.

  • If you have trouble justifying your monitoring duties, you'll face less resistance if you share Wanted: Chief Espionage Officer with the doubting parties. I have yet to read all of this article, but it's a detailed look at (illegal) corporate intelligence gathering.


Regarding the third point -- would anyone care to suggest a Linux distro for my snort-inline and l7-filter projects? I'm going to be running on minimal hardware without X. I'm leaning toward Debian or Slackware and away from Fedora Core, Mandrake, and Gentoo. I'd like a Linux distro that uses the kernel.org kernel as-is, or as much as possible. Is there such a thing? Coming from BSD-land, I'm not current on the Linux scene. Thank you.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Slackware ships a clean kernel from kernel.org, they don't add patches to it like most vendors do. It's uses BSD style start up init scripts instead of the System V style that most other Linux distro's use. The packagemanagement is quite minimal, compared to freebsd.

It runs on minimal hardware.

http://www.slackware.com/install/sysreq.php

So i suggest Slackware. :-)
8:15 AM
Anonymous said…
Debian is a good choice, however if you need something even more minimalistic I've used leaf (particularly Bering-uClibc) to build a couple of firewalls/routers and it works nice. Leaf is as minimalistic as you can get without actually building your own distro from scratch.
1:43 PM
Anonymous said…
I've been running Debilian for a few years now and I'm finally fed up with it. I switched my desktop over to Gentoo and I'm reasonably happy with it.
"Debian Stable" is often mangled to "Debilian Stale" and at least the "Stale" part is true. Debian Stable often lacks new software so one ends up either creating a Debian package for it or manually installing the .tgz - which in itself is an Abomination™ against the packaging effort and concept.
I haven't tried Slackware, but I'd shy away from RedHat and SuSE as well. My preferred distro of the year seems to be Gentoo.

cheers, Axel (http://balrog.de/security/)
4:17 PM
Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
9:44 AM
Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
4:31 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more