Posts tagged Automation and Orchestration

1 min Automation and Orchestration

What are Networking Intrusion Prevention/Detection Systems?

NID(P)S, or Networking Intrusion (Prevention)/Detection Systems [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/intrusion-detection-and-prevention-systems-idps/] are used by a security team for general network security [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/what-is-network-security/] monitoring. They work by passively monitoring (or actively gating, in the NIPS case) network traffic and applying rules or signatures to trigger alerts. Advantages * Easy to deploy: Unlike endpoint devices, they can be placed

11 min Automation and Orchestration

GDB for Fun (and Profit!)

Who Should Read This? Have you ever wondered why your code doesn’t work? Do you ever find yourself puzzled by the way someone else’s program works? Are you tired of spending night after tearful night poring over the same lines of code again and again, struggling to maintain your sanity as it slips away? If this sounds like you or someone you know, please seek help: use a debugger. What Is a Debugger? For those of you that have never used a debugger: 1. I’m so sorry 2. Please read on A debug

4 min Komand

How to Create a Culture of Security Ownership Across Your Organization

Company culture is a phrase that means different things to many people. From the company mission statement to the performance of a team, culture is often an amalgamation of leadership values and individual employee contributions. Security, and its many variants (cybersecurity, infosec, et. al), isn’t always a word associated with “culture”. But in today’s digital landscape, it absolutely should be. Building a successful company culture often comes down to three elements: people, processes, and

3 min Komand

SOC Series: How to Structure and Build a Security Operations Center

Building an effective security operations center (SOC) [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/security-operations-center/] requires organizing internal resources in a way that improves communication and increases efficiencies. Adding to a former post,When to Set Up a Security Operations Center [https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2016/06/01/to-soc-or-not-to-soc-when-to-set-up-a-security-operations-center/] , we're now offering a framework for organizing the three key functions of a SOC: people, proce

14 min Automation and Orchestration

Working with Bro Logs: Queries By Example

Synopsis: Bro [http://bro.org/], a powerful network security monitor, which by default churns out ASCII logs in a easily parseable whitespace separated (column) format from network traffic, live or PCAP. Because this logs are in the aforementioned format it makes them very hackable with the standard unix toolset. If you’re an experienced unix user with ample networking knowledge you probably have all the know-how to immediately pull useful data from Bro logs. If you’re not familiar with the stan

3 min Komand

SOC Series: When to Setup a Security Operations Center

To build a successful security function, you need to coordinate across people, processes, and technology. And the stakes have never been higher than they are today when it comes to information security, which is why many businesses are looking for ways to centralize security operations by way of a security operations center (SOC) [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/security-operations-center/] Check out our Ebook, Presenting Upward: How to Showcase SecOps Metrics that Matter [https://www.rapid

15 min Automation and Orchestration

Nagios Series: Deployment Automation Tips and Tricks

Synopsis: In this article I will be sharing some ideas that I’ve used from my experiences that will help streamline and take a lot of the work out of managing a Nagios deployment. I will go into multiple ways to manage your deployment. As you read on I will introduce a more complete solution. We will begin with git and cron, extend that to use subtrees, and then move along to an enterprise deployment with Puppet and ERB along with the aforementioned tools. Git: My philosophy is that just about

6 min Komand

Building SVG Maps with React

Here at Komand, we needed a way to easily navigate around our workflows. They have the potential to get complex quickly, as security workflows involve many intricate steps. To accomplish this task, we took an SVG approach to render our workflow dynamically (without dealing with div positioning issues). This gave us the power of traditional graphics to do a variety of manipulations on sub components. In this walkthrough, we will useInteractive SVG Components [http://www.petercollingridge.co.u

4 min Automation and Orchestration

Nagios Series: DNS Resiliency

Synopsis: Host operating system resolver libraries are not very good at dealing with an unreachable nameserver. Even if you specify multiple nameservers in resolv.conf and one of them goes down you will experience a period where connections will not be made because resolution is not known. There are a number of resolver tuning options but even reducing the timeout to 1 second there will result in a delay. This affects nearly all unix-like operating systems including GNU/Linux. In this article w

4 min Komand

The SOC of the Future: Predictions from the Front Line

There is no perfect security operations center, and I say that having worked at one in the past [/2016/05/03/6-lessons-i-learned-from-working-in-a-soc/] and collaborated with many others since then. That said, as an industry, we are always evolving and improving. Recently, I shared 6 lessons learned while working in a SOC [/2016/05/03/6-lessons-i-learned-from-working-in-a-soc/], and today I want to talk about where we at Komand believe the SOC is heading in the future and why. Here are seven pr

6 min Automation and Orchestration

Introduction to osquery for Threat Detection and DFIR

What is osquery? osquery is an open source tool created by Facebook [https://github.com/facebook/osquery] for querying various information about the state of your machines. This includes information like: * Running processes * Kernel modules loaded * Active user accounts * Active network connections And much more! osquery allows you to craft your system queries using SQL statements, making it easy to use by security engineers that are already familiar with SQL. osquery is a flexible tool

4 min Komand

What Security Operations Teams Can Learn From Modern Productivity Software

Between your devices, how many apps do you have?The answer for many is dozens, if not hundreds. And many are designed to help us be more efficient: to keep track of growing to do lists, manage complex work tasks, or streamline communication with teams. The trouble is, many of these apps don’t talk to each other very neatly, efficiently, or at all. So it’s no wonder that when the app orchestration solution IFTTT was launched, over one million tasks [http://blog.ifttt.com/post/22129854971/one-mil

4 min Komand

The Dangers Of Linear Thinking and Why Security Analysts Should Defend in Graphs

One of my favorite tweets-turned-into blogs of last year was one by Microsoft security’s John Lambert: “Defenders think in lists, attackers think in graphs. [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/johnla/2015/04/26/defenders-think-in-lists-attackers-think-in-graphs-as-long-as-this-is-true-attackers-win] ” Though it certainly doesn’t entirely sum up the challenges of being a defender, it drummed up some interesting conversation/controversy on twitter. Plus as a nice, pithy statement, it has a good r

3 min Automation and Orchestration

What is Security Orchestration?

The best security operation centers (SOCs) [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/security-operations-center/] are built on efficiency and speed-to-response. But if you’ve ever worked in a SOC or on a security team, you know it’s tough to get your security systems, tools and teams to integrate in a way that streamlines detection, response, and remediation. One of the most tedious tasks of all is cobbling together alert details to assess if a security event is a real threat, along with correlating