Unlock Broader Detections and Forensics with Velociraptor in Rapid7 XDR

Last updated at Thu, 25 Jul 2024 19:50:18 GMT

Nearly 70% of companies that are breached are likely to get breached again within twelve months (CPO). Effective remediation and addressing attacks at the root is key to staying ahead of threats and recurring breaches on the endpoint. Strong Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) ready to go when any incident occurs is a critical piece of a security team’s toolkit and drives successful response and remediation.

With this in mind, we’re excited to announce the integration of Velociraptor, Rapid7’s leading open-source DFIR framework, into the Insight Platform for InsightIDR Ultimate users — all with no additional deployment or configurations required. Already utilized in the field by our Incident Response experts on behalf of Managed Detection and Response (MDR) customers, InsightIDR Ultimate users can now experience the power of Velociraptor, from daily threat monitoring and hunting to swift threat response.

Key benefits of Velociraptor in InsightIDR:

• Hunt for threats and vulnerabilities on single endpoints or across the entire fleet conveniently within InsightIDR, enabling faster identification and remediation.
• Leverage the latest security researcher and practitioner-contributed Artifacts (structured YAML files containing queries) from Velociraptor’s Exchange. This ensures you always have up-to-date coverage across the current threat landscape.
• Monitor for threat activity as it occurs on the endpoint, and forward matching events to InsightIDR for in-depth investigations into potential threats.
• Efficiently analyze all of your Velociraptor data inside of InsightIDR with the flexibility of custom Notebooks (used to track and post process hunts or collaborate on an investigation) or the visual navigation of the Virtual File System (a server side cache of the files on the endpoint).
• Unlock expanded threat detection capabilities – like EVTX or ETW watcher plug-ins to monitor Windows event sources – with Velociraptor’s Client Monitoring feature and forward alert investigations into InsightIDR.
• Get to the bottom of new threats quickly with the most up-to-date detections thanks to Velociraptor’s expressive query language (rather than code) that makes it faster and easier for teams to share custom detections with the open-source community.

Let’s walk through a potential scenario with InsightIDR and Velociraptor

Jo is a SOC analyst on a team that uses Rapid7's XDR solution to monitor and respond to security incidents in a fleet of a few thousand endpoints. This morning, an email notification for a new InsightIDR investigation grabs Jo’s full attention – an endpoint just triggered an alert from a usually quiet detection rule named “Velociraptor - Alert.Windows.ETW.Powershell”, and the data in the preview immediately looks suspicious to Jo.

Jo jumps into InsightIDR to begin their investigation. The endpoint in question has only triggered this single alert so far. It was forwarded from Velociraptor, a recent addition to Jo’s toolset within the Rapid7 Insight Platform. The artifact was one of several they’d deployed to endpoints for continuous monitoring. While InsightIDR and the Sysmon integration could already detect suspicious Powershell commands when included in Process Start commandline arguments, this artifact adds visibility into Windows Powershell ETW provider for logged events.

Jo follows the link to Velociraptor, provided in the InsightIDR Investigation. The link goes directly to the Alert.Windows.ETW.Powershell event page for the endpoint that triggered the investigation. From here, Jo starts a KAPE triage collection on this endpoint. Then they start a hunt across the entire fleet for the indicators of compromise they’ve gathered so far.

Data from Jo’s collection flows into the UI for review. After noticing an unfamiliar grandparent for Powershell in the process list, Jo decides to quarantine the endpoint. They go back to their InsightIDR tab, search for the affected endpoint, and toggle its Quarantine flag. Now that endpoint can only communicate with the Rapid7 Platform, which now includes Velociraptor.  

Among the hundreds in the hunt’s scope, a handful of endpoints return matches for Jo’s initial queries. Jo recruits a few of their teammates to help triage the results and begin deeper investigation. Between Velociraptor’s powerful DFIR capabilities and the skills of Jo’s team, the intruder will be thwarted before completing their mission.  

After the incident response concludes, Jo reviews the new Velociraptor Artifacts they created to detect this new malicious activity. They decide that a few of these will be useful submissions to the Artifact Exchange. They also take the opportunity to browse other recent additions from the DIFR community and deploy a few to their Velociraptor instance.  

With Rapid7’s platform-hosted Velociraptor service, Jo’s team was able to skip another lengthy deployment process and leap right into monitoring and hunting for threats. They were also welcomed to the wider open-source Velociraptor community to share knowledge, threat intel, and DFIR techniques with the practitioners who help Velociraptor thrive.

Learn more about Velociraptor and our expanded endpoint protection.