Monitoring
Monitoring Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud solutions with QRadar
One of the big advantages of having a Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) solution is the fact you don’t need to worry about infrastructure issues, such as patching, network availability, and etc. Also, most of the companies assume that all the security aspects of the solution will be handled by the vendor. Indeed, the vendor is (or should be) responsible for ensuring their system is secure, but it’s important to note that we should still monitor the SaaS solution for hacking attempts, which can be done through QRadar.
Picture this: imagine you have your website on wordpress, you pay wordpress as a service so you don’t need to worry about patching or updates. In theory, the wordpress team also monitors if someone tries to perform an attack against your site (for example, a SQL injection). But let’s say a malicious actor finds out the password of one of your wordpress users and creates a backdoor account for later exploitation. It wouldn’t be flagged by the wordpress security team (since it’s just a new user being created). That’s where QRadar can add value. If you integrate your wordpress with your QRadar solution, you would be able to generate an alert to your system administrator when a user is created or even correlate this event with other events such as pages being modified.
The easiest way to integrate your SaaS with QRadar is through email alerts from your SaaS solution. Let’s take the WordPress example and put it into a step-by-step:
- Install the WordPress “Security Audit log” plugin
- Create a mailbox to receive the alerts
- Create a script that reads your mailbox and saves into a file. For example, you can modify this script to achieve that.
- Create a custom DSM parser that interprets the file generated by the script above.
- Create a log source on QRadar that monitors the file created by the script mentioned on step three. Use the custom DSM on this log source.
The implementation may require some time in the first time, but after setting up your first SaaS it will be trivial to set up the second one (since you will already have the mailbox set up and the script that reads the file). The same step by step can be adapted for a number of other SaaS services, such as: Dropbox, Gmail, Office365, Salesforce, AWS Cloudtrail and CloudWatch, etc…
Some of the events that can be interesting for us: New accounts created, change on security settings, login out of business hours, bruteforce attacks, configuration changes, etc.
Monitoring your SaaS solutions will put you one step ahead, ensuring that even applications on the cloud are being monitored and secure. Remember, even the server not being in your datacentre, the data in a SaaS application still yours.
Detecting ransomware with QRadar using behavioral analysis
Ransomware is one of the top trending concerns in any business; hundreds of business are seeing their data being encrypted even with the latest security solutions. As most of anti-virus solutions are signature based, they are not fully capable of detecting the latest ransomware strains. In this post we will be discussing how to configure QRadar to detect ransomware threats in real time by observing events’ behaviour.
Ransomware may seem a complex attack, but most of them are actually quite simple: The malware encrypts files and then shows a ransom message to the user. The objective of the attacker is to encrypt the files as fast as possible to maximize the impact (if the encryption is slow the user may notice and stop the attack before all the files gets encrypted), and that’s how we can detect the threat.
In a simple language, the encryption process consists in: open a file, read a file, write the encrypted file, close the file. If you are monitoring your servers with QRadar, every time a file is updated an event is generated. So if you detect a high volume of “file update” events in a short period of time, it may be a sign of a ransomware infection.
Based on that, to implement an effective ransomware monitoring capability on QRadar all you need to do is:
- Ensure file audit is enabled on your windows servers: You need to be able to see events such as “File open”, “File Update” and “File Delete”. Before creating any rule, search for those event names to make sure you are getting them. Please note that this can considerably increase your EPS rate, so if you have a large environment and you’re enabling file-access audit consider enabling it in stages and observing your EPS rate.
- Create an offense rule that detect multiple file updates: A good threshold is 500 file updates in a minute. If you see more than 500 file updates in less than a minute, that’s an indication that there is an automated process updating your files (which may be a sign of ransomware).
If you have any mitigation system (such as IBM BigFix or McAfee EPO), you can even trigger a mitigation action to stop the ransomware. For example with QRadar you can send a “process kill” request to IBM BigFix, which will quickly login into the machine and kill the ransomware process.
It is important to note that QRadar is detecting ransomware through system behaviour. This puts QRadar in advantage if compared to regular signature-based anti-virus solutions, since we will be capable of detecting “zero-day” ransomware, which anti-virus solutions may not have signature for it.
This post is based on a very interesting video series called “QRadar Stopping Ransomware” by Jose Bravo. If you want to see step-by-step of how to configure your SIEM to stop ransomware, you should check out his youtube channel.
Running commands across the environment
The daily maintenance across a small environments can be an easy job, but when our environment grows to a point where we have several appliances it can be a though job. For example, in case we need to monitor the Disk Space in a environment of just one appliance, we can simple connect through SSH to the QRadar and run a Linux command such as ‘df -h‘, but in a large environment with several appliances this practice would take a lot of time.
In the QRadar distributed environments, the console acts like a central management console to all the another appliances. In our example of monitoring disk, wouldn’t be easier if we could run a command in the main console to get information about all the environment? It’s exactly what the script ‘all_servers.sh‘ does. The script is located at:
/opt/qradar/support/all_servers.sh
To run the command, you can use the following syntax:
[root@MY_RADAR]# ./opt/qradar/support/all_servers.sh ‘COMMAND’
(Where COMMAND is what you want to run in the appliances)
In our example of monitoring the disk size, we could use:
[root@MY_RADAR]# ./opt/qradar/support/all_servers.sh ‘df -h’ > /root/drive_space.txt
And it would write the result of the script on all the servers in the following file: /root/drive_space.txt
The script can be used for several different purposes: Monitoring disk space, Monitoring CPU, Viewing network configurations, checking logs, etc. Can you imagine how it could help in your environment?! Had good ideas of how to integrate it with your monitoring systems?! Let us know in the comments!
— This post was suggested and written by our new collaborator, Tomasz Stankiewicz.
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