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August 25, 2021

File-based logs? Yes, they're still being used!

File-based logs are where it all began. These logs can yield information of great value to security analysts and administrators alike. Armed with this information, IT professionals are better equipped to troubleshoot issues, evaluate system performance, identify bugs, and even detect security breaches. In today’s world, we tend to focus on the modern, integrated logging facilities like Microsoft’s Windows Event Log or Apple’s Unified Logging System (ULS). However, all the major operating systems still generate log files that may or may not be integrated into these logging facilities.

July 29, 2021

Using Raijin Database Engine to aggregate and analyze Windows security events

In this post, we will look at how to use Raijin Database Engine as a backend in a centralized logging environment for collecting and aggregating Windows security events. We will also show you how to integrate Raijin with an open source data exploration tool. Finally, you will see how you can track suspicious network activity and identify specific types of intrusion on Windows hosts using these tools. A low-cost, lean and mean data discovery solution Although the combination of tools we present here cannot compete with a full-fledged SIEM solution, they do offer quite a few advantages for security analysts who need a responsive, highly customizable data discovery solution that accepts ad hoc SQL.

July 15, 2021

Top 5 Windows Security logs everyone should collect

It goes without saying that across your business infrastructure, there should be a commitment to protect not only the hardware and software assets, but the plethora of data that is transmitted through and stored in it. However, to successfully safeguard such data, it is imperative to have an effective audit policy in place that includes the collection of security events as its essential component. Windows provides a wealth of security logs that are visible in the built-in Security channel of Event Viewer.

July 1, 2021

Top 5 security concerns revealed with DNS logging

The Domain Name System (DNS) facilitates communication between all devices connected to the Internet. It consists of hierarchical servers that can translate any given hostname, along with its corresponding domain name, to its internet protocol (IP) address(es). One of the most common is the windows DNS server that ensures that data requests are sent to their correct endpoints while providing human-readable addresses for websites connected to the Internet. With the ever-growing number of cloud-based devices and technologies, for instance, the Internet of things (IoT), portals, web applications, as well as online transaction processing, it is more important than ever to identify the actual physical addresses of remote devices when relying on DNS-dependent connectivity.

June 16, 2021

Forwarding logs with NXLog

So, you managed to read through all the compliance mandates that are required for the industry you are in. And, during the mandatory consultation you had with your company’s IT security expert and network manager you came to an agreement on which logs to collect and carefully selected their final destination. Which — in most cases — is usually some kind of analytics system or SIEM technology where log data can be analyzed and stored based on your business requirements.

June 14, 2021

Windows Event Log collection in a nutshell

Unquestionably, Microsoft Windows is the number one desktop operating system in the world, as well as having a significant share of the server operating system market. Multi-million-dollar organizations rely heavily on Windows Server and Active Directory to provide a safe, secure networked environment for their business operations. Such an enterprise infrastructure alone can generate thousands of events per second that range anywhere from benign user authentication events to logs indicating a severe software failure, or even more serious events such as DoS attacks or intrusion attempts.

June 5, 2021

Flexible, cloud-backed Modbus/TCP log collection with NXLog and Python

Modbus is a simple and flexible protocol used by a wide variety of industrial and automation equipment. Its simplicity has made it attractive for many manufacturers, but it also poses a number of challenges in terms of security and traffic analysis. In this post, we’ll show you how to use NXLog to capture, process, and extract useful security information from Modbus traffic. What makes Modbus traffic analysis challenging? Modbus is a low-level protocol that effectively uses only two data types: bits (in the form of coils), and 16-bit words (in the form of registers), which are also the only form of data that can be natively addressed with most devices.

March 23, 2021

Responsible disclosure - Our encounter with Monero mining

On the 18th of March, we noticed some unusual activity on one of our servers we use for build automation. Further investigation revealed that an outside party had deployed a Monero miner. The server was immediately taken offline. There was no customer data stored on the server and we have since replaced all our private keys and secrets that might have been potentially compromised. After careful and thorough investigation of the incident, we decided to publish this announcement and share this news with our customers and users, hoping that it might serve as a lesson for others.

February 22, 2021

Setting up a Windows Event Collector (WEC) on Linux

Windows Event Forwarding (WEF) is a service available on Microsoft Windows platforms which enables the forwarding of events from Windows Event Log to a central Windows Event Collector. Since the technology is built into the operating system, this means you can centralize log collection without having to install third party software on each Windows node. You can also use Group Policy for configuring clients to forward their events. This approach not only standardizes client management but also streamlines it.

February 1, 2021

Sending logs to Microsoft Sentinel with NXLog

What if you could selectively ingest only the high-quality events needed for metrics and reporting that come not only from Azure, but also from other cloud- based resources and on-site assets directly into Microsoft Sentinel? In this post, the technology we will be examining is the Azure Monitor HTTP Data Collector API, which enables clients, such as the NXLog agent, to send events to a Log Analytics workspace, making them directly accessible using Microsoft Sentinel queries.

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