Announcements Archives - Page 2 of 6

EventSentry v4.0 – Introducing ADMonitor

March 28, 2019April 25, 2019 ingmar.koecher 0 Comment Announcements, EventSentry, Monitoring, Security, Tools & Utilities Active Directory Auditing, Active Directory Monitoring, ad monitoring, group policy changes, group policy monitoring

Since Active Directory is the foundation of all Windows networks, monitoring Active Directory needs to be part of any comprehensive security strategy. Up to version 3.5, EventSentry utilized Windows auditing and the security event log to provide reports on:

User Account Changes
Group Changes
Computer Account Changes

While this functionality provides a good basis for monitoring the most relevant changes to Active Directory, we felt that a more comprehensive approach to monitoring Active Directory was needed – without the need to install & maintain yet another product!

ADMonitor is new (optional) component included in EventSentry that vastly improves Active Directory monitoring with these additional features:

Monitors changes to all objects (e.g. OUs) – not just users/groups/computers
Captures every attribute change made to an object, not just high level changes
Provides before & after values for all changes
Monitors Group Policy changes
User status reports (show idle users, users with non-expiring passwords, …)
Monitoring does not require auditing

We’re excited that we can now offer EventSentry ADMonitor to our users who are looking for a more in-depth Active Directory monitoring solution.

Active Directory is essentially a representation of the employees and their roles in your organization. But employees come and go, roles/responsibilities change, contractors get temporary access and so forth. But while adding users and additional access is usually reflected properly in Active Directory (otherwise IT would get a call because somebody presumably can’t do their job), removing access is often forgotten. As a result, users that should have been removed from AD a long time ago continue to exist. With ADMonitor it’s easy to identify orphaned user accounts (and many others) and keep your Active Directory lean and clean.

Since a significant development effort stands behind ADMonitor, it will be offered as an optional component that is licensed on a per-user basis. Pricing is very competitive with other solutions and we also offer bundle discounts to customers who already own or will purchase agent licenses; please request a quote here.

But enough theory, let’s look into the installation, configuration and reporting of ADMonitor.

Installation

Since ADMonitor is a component of EventSentry, it’s easily activated as part of the main EventSentry setup. Just like with other components of EventSentry (Heartbeat Monitor, Collector, …), users have the option to enable ADMonitor during the post installation setup procedure.

ADMonitor can be installed on any host that is part of the domain that needs to be monitored, it does not need to be installed on a domain controller.

Immediately following the initial installation, ADMonitor will initialize itself by creating an offline copy of all Active Directory objects. This process can take from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on the number of objects in AD, connection speed to the domain controller as well as the overall performance of the host running ADMonitor.

Configuration

The initial configuration of ADMonitor is simple and only requires you to pick a password for the ADMonitor service account. If you’re adding ADMonitor to an existing installation you may also need to select the appropriate EventSentry database action to which ADMonitor reports changes. Otherwise, ADMonitor is ready from the get go and will monitor all Active Directory changes.

Reporting

ADMonitor provides three types of reports:

Object Changes
Group Policy Changes
User Status

Object Changes
Shows any change made to an AD objects. Reports can be filtered on the type of action performed (added, removed, modified), on the object type (user, group, organizationalUnit, …) and on the user who performed the action.

Note that the detailed changes to group policies are available in the “Group Policy Changes” report below. Of course you can expect the same type of summary view you’re already used to from most other EventSentry features and create reports like:

Show all changes to organizational units
Show all new objects created
Show all users that were changed
and more

Group Policy Changes
When a group policy is changed, it is first indicated on the “Object Changes” report, since the versionNumber attribute of the AD object changes. The actual group policy settings themselves are available on the “Group Policy Changes” report however, since group policy settings are not stored in AD.

The screen shot below shows that the Default Domain Policy was changed, with the Specify traps for the public community setting being enabled.

Users
The users report helps you identify potentially problematic user accounts such as idle users, users who haven’t change their passwords in years and others.

This report contains a list of all user objects in Active Directory including the following details:

Name, Full Name, SAM Account Name, Path, UPN
Administrative Account (yes/no)
Disabled (yes/no)
Password Never Expires (yes/no)
Password Expired (yes/no)
Password must change (yes/no)
Locked Out (yes/no)
Last Logon
Password Last Set
Account Expiration Date
Creation Date

With ADMonitor you can now get detailed user stats with just a few clicks and quickly identify user accounts that need to be reviewed, changed or deleted. Of course you can also schedule all reports directly from the web reports and get daily/weekly AD status reports directly in your inbox, e.g.:

List of all Group Policy changes
List of all idle user accounts
List of all newly created users and/or groups

You can also create your own reports for just about anything that involves a change to an Active Directory object, for example all organizational units created in the last 24 hours.

ADMonitor also includes a number of stand-alone utilities that support advanced features such as filtering and email notifications that I will cover in a future post.

With ADMonitor, EventSentry users can now gain the additional visibility needed to fully audit all Active Directory & Group Policy changes. As a result, EventSentry users can more easily enhance compliance, security and accountability in their network without the need to install additional software – saving both time and money.

EventSentry v3.5 Released: Windows Process Monitoring to the Max, Registry Tracking, Tags & More

July 31, 2018July 31, 2018 ingmar.koecher 0 Comment Announcements, EventSentry, Monitoring, Tips & Tricks, Tools & Utilities file entropy, fim, process network activity, registry change monitoring, registry change tracking

EventSentry v3.5 continues to increase visibility into networks with additional vantage points, making it easier for EventSentry users to reduce their attack surface as well as discover anomalies.

Process & Network Activity Tracking

One major focus of this release is process network activity, an important component in any monitoring strategy. Do you know which applications listen for incoming connections on your monitored machines – or when a new process suddenly starts accepting incoming traffic? Do you know which processes perform outgoing network connections, and to where? How much data are they transferring?

Process Tracking with Sysmon — Figure 1: View process network activity from Sysmon

To help you (and possibly your overzealous auditors) answer these questions, EventSentry v3.5 takes the existing process tracking functionality to the next level by integrating with Sysmon and showing processes with active or listening network connections. With EventSentry deployed you can now see:

Complete Process Details (start & stop times, duration, caller, PID)
Process checksum
Process command line
All processes listening for incoming connections
All active processes
Network activity initiated by a process (Figure 1, requires Sysmon)
Correlation with EventSentry NetFlow (Figure 2, requires NetFlow component)

This means that you can easily see which network connections a host establishes if you have Sysmon installed, and can even correlate that information with the EventSentry NetFlow component with just a click (see below). This information is invaluable for forensics and troubleshooting alike.

Process Network Activity — Figure 2: Detailed process network activity from NetFlow data

But even without Sysmon, EventSentry can now show you every open TCP port on a monitored machine (optionally all active connections as well), making it easy to discover rogue services on a network – even if they are blocked by the firewall. Figure 3 below shows all active processes which are listening for incoming connections, grouped by host.

All Active Listening Processes — Figure 3: All active processes which are listening for incoming network connections

Registry Tracking

A new member in the compliance tracking features family is registry tracking. Similar to file access tracking, it normalizes all registry audit events on a monitored machine, making it much easier to report on the registry activity and changes. Configuring registry tracking to work with existing registry auditing is incredibly easy and can be enabled in 60 seconds if the proper audit settings are already in place. The screen shots below show a list of recent registry activity as well as the details of changes:

Registry Tracking Details — List of changes made to critical registry values

FIM

The file checksum monitoring component received a few enhancements to help reduce noise while also adding new functionality.

FIM can now verify the digital signature of executable files and optionally suppress alerts if a file is digitally signed – think Windows updates. This can reduce the number of alerts you get significantly and thus make the remaining alerts more meaningful. The digital signature status can also be displayed in the web reports as a new column.

FIM can also calculate the entropy (essentially a measure of randomness) of files with a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the maximum of a completely random file. This is useful for Ransomware detection, since encrypted (and compressed files as well) files have a higher entropy than regular files. Combined with a threshold filter this can detect when a large number of encrypted files are suddenly being processed in a given directory and thus indicate a Ransomware infection.

File Monitoring Alert — File monitoring alerts now include signature details and entropy

We also replaced the existing SHA-256 checksum algorithm with a faster version in 3.5 which should result in a lower CPU utilization on systems which need to calculate a large number of checksums.

Disk Space Monitoring

A common annoyance with disk space monitoring are large volumes where an otherwise useful limit of, say 5%, is just not useful. For example, 5% of a 2 Tb drive is still 100 Gb, and in most cases there is probably no reason to sound an alarm. Dynamic thresholds (a new feature) addresses this issue by automatically adjusting the limit based on the drive size. The result: Fewer alerts!

EventSentry will log an event to the application event log when dynamic thresholds are enabled AND the current settings warrant a change. An event will look something like this:

The percentage-based threshold on drive F:\ has been dynamically adjusted from 5 percent to 0.5 percent based on the total drive size of 999 GB. A low disk space alert will be triggered when the available space on this volume falls below 19 GB.

Other Improvements

The software inventory page (detailed tab) will now show which hosts do NOT have a particular software installed when the search is restricted to a specific software product. Also related to processes, process tracking can now generate the checksum of all execute files, which can then be searched for at Malware databases like virustotal.com. If you utilize the maintenance mode feature in EventSentry then you can now see whether a host is in maintenance mode or not in the web reports. And last but not least, event logs can now be sent to a remote Syslog receiver via TLS.

Under the Hood

We always tweak and improve EventSentry to ensure it runs as efficiently as possible. In this release we replaced the SHA 256 algorithm with a more efficient version, resulting in less CPU usage by the agent when calculating SHA 256 checksums. As we gradually move to a full 64-bit monitoring suite, the Heartbeat Agent is the next component now also available as a 64-bit process so that all EventSentry services are now available in 64-bit. We plan on porting all executables over to 64-bit within the next 6-12 months. At that point you will not be able to run EventSentry on 32-bit platforms anymore; monitoring 32-bit hosts will of course still be supported for the foreseeable future.

To help with the stability of all EventSentry and simply troubleshooting, all server-side components will now automatically generate crash dumps if they encounters a problem. Finally, the management console includes additional context and ribbon buttons.

EventSentry SysAdmin Tools: Digital Signature Verification with checksum.exe

March 16, 2018March 16, 2018 ingmar.koecher 0 Comment Announcements, Tips & Tricks, Tools & Utilities authenticode, digital signature, file checksum, fim

Windows supports a code-signing feature called Authenticode, which allows a software publisher to digitally sign executable files (e.g. .exe, .msi, …) so that users can verify their autenticity. The digital signature of a file can be viewed in the file properties in Windows explorer on the “Digital Signature” tab.

Viewing the digital signature of the Opera browser

Digital signature verification has been added to the checksum utility, which already calculates the checksum and entropy of a file. When using the new /s switch, checksum.exe will tell you whether:

the file is digitally signed
a counter signature exists
the digital signature is valid
the algorithm used (e.g. SHA 256)
who signed the file
who issued the certificate
when the file was signed

The utility also sets the ERRORLEVEL variable accordingly; if a signature check is requested with the /s switch but the file is unsigned, then checksum.exe will return %ERRORLEVEL% 2. Below is a sample output of the utility in action:

Viewing the digital signature of the Windows ping utility

Digital signature verification will be added to EventSentry’s FIM monitoring component (“File Checksum Monitoring”) in the upcoming v3.4.3 release, which will give you the option to only get notified when unsigned files are changed, thus reducing overall noise.

You can download the latest version from here – enjoy!

EventSentry v3.4: New Security Features, Software Version Checker, Better Performance & more!

November 6, 2017November 7, 2017 ingmar.koecher 0 Comment Announcements, Event Log, EventSentry, Monitoring, RansomWare, Tools & Utilities auditing, diskspace monitoring, netflow, ransomware, UPS Monitoring

We’re again excited to announce the availability of EventSentry v3.4, the latest release of our hybrid SIEM monitoring suite.

EventSentry v3.4 delivers a number of new features to

Protect yourself against ransomware attacks
Detect lateral movement on a network with collector thresholds
Identify outdated software on your network
View detailed bandwidth utilization (requires NetFlow)
Monitor attached UPS devices
Integrate with open source solutions (Graylog, ELK, Nagios Log Server & others)

and more. We’ve also been focusing on making the data EventSentry collects more actionable and subsequently more helpful, and as result you will see additional contextual data provided with some alerts & reports, and one new search page in EventSentry.

All in all, this upcoming release has a lot of improvements in store to help you do your job better by ensuring that your network is as reliable, secure and fast as possible.

Audit Subcategories with audit success enabled, grouped by host

Ransomware

While high-profile Ransomware attacks have slowed down somewhat in recent weeks, businesses – especially small businesses – are still hit with Ransomware infections every day. Even though EventSentry is not positioned as a AV or a AntiMalware software, it does include a variety of functionality which can detect Ransomware outbreaks.

What sets EventSentry apart from AV and most AntiMalware solutions is that it looks for pattern exhibited by the Ransomware – regardless of the variant. What’s new in version v3.4 is the ability to detect changes to the MBR and bootsector as well as the ability to calculate the entropy of (changed) files.

MBR/BootSector Monitoring & Backup
Some more recent Ransomware variants modify the MBR and/or boot sector and trigger a reboot to initiate an offline encryption process. EventSentry v3.4 can now monitor the MBR and detect changes in near real-time to alert the admin when suspicious activity is occurring.

By utilizing EventSentry’s advanced filtering engine it is also possible to potentially stop the encryption process, e.g. by hibernating the infected host. EventSentry even backs up the MBR and boot sector, making it possible to repair an infected system (with a boot disk) without having to perform a full restore from backup.

File Entropy
Entropy describes the randomness of a file, essentially a metric that can help detect compressed and encrypted files.

Since most Ransomware encrypts large amounts of files, EventSentry can utilize the entropy of a file, combined with event log thresholds, to make a determination that a Ransomware infection is in progress and take corrective measures.

Lateral Movement Detection with Thresholds

Lateral Network Movement — Lateral movement through a network

EventSentry has always included agent-side thresholds in order to throttle the alert volume or detect repeated events. Because these thresholds were executed on the agents, event patterns which involved more than one host could not be detected that way.

By adding a threshold component to collector – which analyzes and processes all events in real time – we can leverage this feature to new heights and detect network-wide event-based patterns – in real time!

Collector-side thresholds are configured exactly like agent-side thresholds with one the key difference – the threshold limit applies to all aggregated events sent to the collector. Collector-side thresholds also introduce the “Group By” setting that makes the lateral movement detection possible – the ability to count unique instances of an event property, and not just the total number of events.

Some of the event-based threat patterns you can detect:

The same user logging on to multiple hosts within a specific time frame
A process spreading (trickling) across multiple hosts within a specific time frame
A user running too many processes – either on a single or multiple hosts
Authentication failures of a user on too many hosts
Too many unique logon types used by a user account

Any event property and insertion string can be used to craft thresholds – the sky is the limit.

Software Version Checker

Earlier versions of EventSentry include a substantial hardware, software and patch inventory, making it extremely easy to find out which software packages are installed on your network, but also get alerted when software is installed or removed from a server/workstation.

In v3.4 we are taking this to the next level by providing the latest version available from the publisher for a growing list of 100+ software packages so that you can effortlessly identify outdated software on your network. You can now create reports listing any software on your network which is outdated, a dashboard tile is also available. The Web Reports refresh the version info list every 2 hours to ensure all reports are accurate.

If an application you are using on your network is not currently included then simply email us the name of the software as it is detected by EventSentry (and ideally the URL where we can obtain the current version) and we will add it to our list.

64-bit Web Reports for Windows

The EventSentry web reports are now available as a 64-bit application, and upgrading to v3.4 will automatically upgrade the existing v3.x 32-bit web reports to 64-bit on 64-bit when installed/upgraded on a 64-bit version of Windows. The new 64-bit web reports will allow you to run larger reports that would not run due to limits with the address space associated with 32-bit applications.

UPS & Battery Monitoring

Any UPS directly attached to a server/workstations that is detected by Windows can now be monitored by EventSentry. The status of the UPS will show up on the host inventory page, and alerts will be generated when a host is on battery power and back on AC power. EventSentry can also initiate a shutdown when the remaining run-time or charge level falls below a certain limit.

Batteries in laptops are also detected and listed on the host inventory page (battery capacity and current charge level), but generated alerts are informational only.

User Activity Tracking

While EventSentry provides its users with a wealth of information from multiple angles, it can be tedious to piece together data from multiple reports that is associated with a specific user. Data which can be linked to a user is scattered among process tracking, file access tracking, compliance logons and other pages.

The new “User Activity” page, which is located in the “Dashboard” menu, solves this problem by displaying data from the following pages on a single page:

Logons
Processes
File Access
Active Directory Changes
Tasks
Events

The user activity page makes seeing all activity by a user as easy as never before!

Integration with third-party log management solutions

A few months ago, one of our users approached with the need to integrate EventSentry into an existing log management system which was already in place at the location where EventSentry was to be deployed. While reviewing the request we recognized that even though we position EventSentry as a one-stop log management solution with a compelling and robust web-based reporting component, an integration with other products can be helpful in some cases.

Supplement EventSentry’s built-in reporting with additional reporting
Integrate EventSentry with an existing log management solution located in a different business unit
Integrate EventSentry’s sophisticated real-time agent and deployment infrastructure with a different log management back-end

In version 3.3 and earlier, EventSentry can be integrated with 3rd party products using the HTTP, process and Syslog action. The HTTP & process action are intended to be used with ticketing systems where only a low volume of alerts are submitted while the Syslog action obviously supports submitting a high volume of events. The Syslog format was however limited to the traditional RFC 3164 format, making an integration with other log management systems difficult.

Starting with version 3.4, EventSentry now supports the following formats in the Syslog action

RFC 3164 (legacy)
Snare
RFC 5424
GELF (Graylog)
Nagios Log Server
Common Event Format (CEF)
JSON (customizable)

If a log management server you need to integrate with is not listed above but supports the JSON format, then you can craft your own JSON packet with the JSON format, also introduced in v3.4.

Disk Space Alerts

Part of the effort to make EventSentry’s alerts more actionable is reflected in our improved disk space alerts which now list the 15 largest files and folders of the volume where disk space is low. The supplemental data will in many cases be enough to immediately identify the culprit so that corrective action can be taken immediately, without the need to run disk space analyzers on the volume.

Diskspace Alert with embedded file/folder size info

Audit Policy Status

Since the introduction of the compliance tracking components, EventSentry has been recording all audit (and many other!) changes performed in Windows as part of the “Policy Changes” feature. It wasn’t however possible to see the current status of all audit categories and subcategories at a glance. Reviewing the current audit status of all monitored hosts can be important however, if only to verify that group policies are configured correctly.

In v3.4 we now have the new “Status” page available under “Compliance -> Audit Policy” which delivers information such as:

Compare/review audit settings of a particular sub category (e.g. “Registry”) among all monitored hosts
View all disabled audit settings across all or select hosts
(Re)view audit settings based on computer types (e.g. domain controllers, servers, workstations)

NetFlow Bandwidth

Our NetFlow component can now provide bandwidth visualization based on the collected NetFlow data. The information can either be accessed on the NetFlow page or as a dashboard tile. Even though bandwidth data can already be determined using SNMP, the data gathered by NetFlow should be preferred since it contains additional data not available via SNMP, such as:

Packets sent/received
Bytes sent/received
Bytes per packet
% Utilization

Bytes per packet as well as packets sent received can be used to detect anomalies, e.g. when a host sends a large amount of network packets, or network packets with large/small content.

EventSentry v3.3 Part 2: Event annotation, Filter Chaining, RegEx and more

December 16, 2016November 8, 2018 ingmar.koecher 0 Comment Announcements, EventSentry, Monitoring, Tools & Utilities application & services logs, event log regex, netflow, recent network activity

In my previous post I talked about our new NetFlow component as well as the new agent management capabilities now available in EventSentry v3.3. In this post I’ll cover the remaining new features and improvements we’ve made in v3.3, starting with the web reports.

Web Reports
There are a number of new features and improvements in addition to NetFlow visualization. There are a few new dashboard tiles, including a “Recent Activity” tile which – as the name implies – shows recent relevant changes such as newly detected processes, software (un)installed, ping status or service status changes.

Viewing recent activity on the dashboard

Anybody who works in a team of two or more Sysadmins should find the new notes feature incredibly helpful. It lets any web reports user add comments (=notes) which are subsequently visible to others. Notes can be associated with one or more hosts (ensuring they show up in the “Documentation” tab of the respective host status page) and can include documents as attachments as well! Do you have warranty documents or network diagrams you want to store in a central place – easily accessible? That’s what the notes are for.

The overall look and feel has also been refreshed, and we’ve reorganized the menu to make it faster to access dashboards and easier to find pages.

The visualization of data has been improved, since some chart types work better with certain features of EventSentry. You can now visualize grouped data using either pie charts, tree maps or column charts.

The security of the web reports has also improved with a lockout policy which will locking an account after too many unsuccessful logon events.

Monitoring Improvements
As mentioned in part 1, the EventSentry is agent is now available in 64-bit, making it possible to monitor 64-bit counters and easier to monitor files in 64-bit directories. For users upgrading from an earlier version, the EventSentry management console will automatically migrate any existing 32-bit agents on 64-bit versions of Windows.

Application & Services Event Logs
While monitoring Application & Services event logs, often referred to as “custom” event logs was possible, the way this needed to be configured in the management console was a common source of confusion. Some users also needed the ability to monitor more than 30 different logs. Consequently, monitoring additional event logs is now straightforward, and users can monitor as many event logs as they wish.

Filter Chaining
With thresholds, timers, schedules, insertion strings, EventSentry already offers a sophisticated engine for monitoring events in real time. New in this release is the ability to setup filter chaining. This makes it possible to trigger actions only when 2 or more events occur, and you can even link events together using insertion strings. Chaining is enabled on the package level, and every filter in a “chaining” package is automatically part of the filter chaining rules.

Event Annotation
It happens frequently that we get alerts that require us to do additional research based on the information provided in the alert. For example, we may get an alert about an IP address for which we then need to do a reverse lookup or find the geoip location. Audit Success & Failure events from the security event log are another example, and often contain error codes and numbers which are not explained.

Green line shows reverse lookup, blue line geo location

We set out to improve upon this, and starting with v3.3 EventSentry will annotate email alerts in a number of ways whenever possible:

IP addresses will include a reverse lookup
IP addresses will include a geoip location
Security events will have various error codes resolved

Please note that (1) and (2) are only supported for emails sent through the collector since it requires access to a local geoip database. (1) and (2) will need to be enabled in the email action “Options”, (3) is automatically enabled for all emails.

Insertion Strings & Regex
By making insertion strings from events accessible in filters and actions (e.g. through the $STR1, $STR2, … variables), it’s possible to create highly granular thresholds, customize emails, easily trigger corrective actions which utilize content from events and more. Based on our own requirements we took this capability a step further however, and you can now apply regex filters to events to define your own insertion strings. This is particularly useful for alerts which don’t use insertion strings or for events which contain log data. For those types of events, you can now parse parts of log strings and assign them to insertion strings. The previous blog article, Detecting Web Server Scan in Real-Time, shows a practical example of how to apply this new feature. It does require you to be a bit familiar with Regular Expressions, but the management console includes a handy dialog where you can test your regular expressions, shown below.

Regex preview & test utility in management console

Performance
Faster is better! We’ve improved performance in a number of areas:

The database insert performance of the Syslog daemon has been improved for Microsoft SQL Server databases
The delimited log file feature now includes an additional index to increase database insert performance
The heartbeat agent now relies less on RPC-based agent status monitoring and can instead obtain the status of a remote agent either directly from the collector or the database, resulting in less network traffic and faster heartbeat monitoring cycles.

With new features & improvements in a variety of areas, this release should contain improvements for everyone. Remember that you can also submit feature requests here.

EventSentry Blog

Category: Announcements