Snort Near Real Time Detection Project

I don't think many people noticed this story, but on Thursday Sourcefire Labs published A New Detection Framework on the VRT blog and a NRT page on their labs site. I had a small part in this development due to the Incident Detection Summit I organized late last year. Sourcefire sent an army of developers (I think they had the biggest contingent) to the conference and clearly enjoyed participating. During the event they spoke to participants from multiple security teams and had follow-up discussions with several of us.

One item we emphasized with Sourcefire was the need for analysis of file contents, not just network traffic. As Matt mentions in his latest post, Mike Cloppert and his team have used these approaches very effectively and have even published components of their work as open source projects like Vortex by Charles Smutz. In my NSM in products post last year I called this extracted content and listed it as one of the forms of NSM data.

What does this mean? The basic idea is that you extract content from network traffic, analyze it, record metadata, and so on, and then provide that information to a security analyst. That may sound like an anti-malware approach, but the idea is to provide indicators, not necessarily block transmission. In any case, Sourcefire published a presentation on their site on what their beta code can do. I'm really glad to see them working on this problem and sharing results in a form that interested parties can download and test.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Not quite fireeye, or mcafee ntr.. but a step in the correct direction for sourcefire.
7:21 PM
Richard Bejtlich said…
The idea isn't to replicate McAfee NTR or FireEye capability. It's not just about malware execution.
6:26 AM
CyberG said…
But to that point, there are a lot of players in the NSM market that are beating SF to the punch with new features. While 4.9 was a nice upgrade, the feature set has been somewhat stagnant for awhile now. I'm glad they are moving in the right direction now in trying to become a leader again, instead of keeping the status quo in IDS. Now if they could just create a SF Splunk App that shows payload, I would be drinking the SF kool-aid again.
2:14 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