Category Archives: How To

How often should security logs be reviewed?

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Security logs are one of the most important components of any security program. They provide insight into how well your security program is working, and they serve as a valuable source of intelligence for incident response. However, they are not perfect; they can contain false positives and false negatives. As a result, they need to be reviewed regularly to ensure they are providing accurate information.

There are two main reasons why security log reviews are necessary. First, they allow you to identify problems before they become serious incidents. Second, they allow you to determine whether your current security measures are effective.

When reviewing logs, look for three things:

1. Incidents – These are events that indicate something has gone wrong. For example, a firewall blocking access to a website, or a virus scanning software alerting you to a malware infection.

2. False Positives – These are alerts that don’t represent anything actually happening. For example, a virus scanner warning you about a file that was downloaded from the Internet without any infection identified.

3. False Negatives – These are alerts that do represent something actually happening, but were missed because of a flaw in the system. For example, a server being accessed remotely, but no alarms raised.

Reviewing logs every day is recommended. If you review logs daily, you will catch issues sooner and prevent them from becoming major incidents. This should be done on a rotating basis by the security team to prevent fatigue from diminishing the quality of the work, or via automated methods to reduce fatigue.

Peer reviewing logs weekly is also recommended. It allows you to spot trends and anomalies that might otherwise go unnoticed by a single reviewer. It also gives a second set of eyes on the logs, and helps guard against fatigue or bias-based errors.

Finally, aggregated trend-based monthly reviews are recommended. This gives you a chance to look back and see if there have been any changes to your environment that could affect your security posture or represent anomalies. This is a good place to review items like logged events per day, per system, trends on specific log events and the like. Anomalies should be investigated. Often times, this level of log review is great for spotting changes to the environment or threat intelligence.

If you want to learn more about how to conduct log reviews effectively, reach out to us at info@microsolved.com. We’re happy to help!

How long should security logs be kept?

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Security logs are a great source of information for incident response, forensics, and compliance purposes. However, log retention policies vary widely among organizations. Some keep logs indefinitely; others only retain them for a certain period of time. Logging practices can impact how much useful information is available after a compromise has occurred.

In general, the longer logs are retained, the better. But, there are several factors to consider when determining how long to keep logs. These include:

• What type of system is being monitored?

• Is the system mission-critical?

• Are there any legal requirements regarding retention of logs?

• Does the company have a policy regarding retention of logs? If so, does it match industry standards?

• How often do incidents occur?

• How many employees are affected by each incident?

• How many incidents are reported?

• How many hours per day are logs collected?

• How many days per week are logs collected?

It is important to understand the business needs before deciding on a retention policy. For example, if a company has a policy of retaining logs for 90 days, then it is reasonable to assume that 90 days is sufficient for the majority of situations. However, if a company has no retention policy, then it is possible that the logs could be lost forever.

Logs are one of the most valuable sources of information during an investigation. It is important to ensure that the right people have access to the logs and that they are stored securely. In addition, it is important to know how long logs need to be kept.

MicroSolved provides a number of services related to logging and monitoring. We can help you create logging policies and practices, as well as design log monitoring solutions. Drop us a line at info@microsolved.com if you’d like to discuss logging and logging solutions.

What should be in a security log?

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Logging is one of the most important aspects of any security program. It provides a record of events that occur within your environment, which allows you to understand how your systems are being used and what vulnerabilities exist. Logging helps you identify issues before they become problems, and it gives you insight into what happened after the fact.

There are many different types of logs, each with its own purpose. Some logs are designed to provide information about system activity, while others are intended to capture information about network traffic or application behavior. There are also different levels of logging, ranging from basic records of actions taken by applications, to detailed records of every event that occurs during the execution of an application.

In general, the more detail you can include in your logs, the better. For instance, if you’re looking for evidence of a compromise, you’ll need to look for signs of unauthorized access to your systems. A log entry that includes details about the IP addresses involved in the request will allow you to correlate the requests with the users making them. Similarly, if you’re trying to determine whether a particular file was accessed by someone else, you’ll need to examine the contents of the log entries associated with that file.

As you consider what type of logs to create, keep in mind that not all logs are created equal. In addition, not all logs are equally useful. For example, a log of HTTP requests might be helpful in determining whether a web server has been compromised, but it won’t tell you much about the nature of the threat. On the other hand, a log of failed login attempts could indicate that a malicious actor is attempting to gain access to your systems.

The best way to decide what kind of logs to create is to think about the specific threats you face and the kinds of information you want to collect. If you’re concerned about a particular type of threat, such as phishing emails, then you’ll probably want to track email messages sent to your domain. If you’re worried about malware infections, you’ll likely want to monitor the activities of your users’ computers.

In general, as a minimum, make sure the elements of the common logging format are included and build from there. If you need assistance with log design or help determining and implementing a logging strategy, drop us a line at info@microsolved.com. We’re happy to help! 

Automating SSL Certificate Management with Certbot and Let’s Encrypt

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As we posted previously, following best practices for SSL certificate management is critical to properly secure your site. In that post, we discussed automating certificate management as a best practice. This post is an example of how to do just that.
 
To do so, we will use the highly-trusted free certificate provider Let’s Encrypt. We will also leverage the free certificate automation tool Certbot.
 

Installing Certbot

Installing Certbot is pretty easy, overall, but you do need to be comfortable with the command line and generally know how to configure your chosen web server. That said, if you check out the Certbot site, you will find a dropdown menu that will let you pick your chosen web server and operating system. Once you make your selections, simply follow the on-screen step-by-step instructions. In our testing, we found them to be complete and intuitive.
 

That’s It!

Following the on-screen instructions will have:

  • Certbot installed
  • Configure your web server for the certificate
  • Generate, get and install the certificate
  • Implement automatic renewals of the certificate to prevent expiration

You can literally go from a basic website to fully implemented and automated SSL in a matter of moments. Plenty of support is available from EFF for Certbot, or via Let’s Encrypt. In our testing, we ran into no issues and the implementation completed successfully each time.

Give it a shot! This might be one of the easiest and most effective security controls to automate. Together, Certbot and Let’s Encrypt can create a no-cost cryptography solution for your web sites in a very short amount of time.

SSL Certificate High-Level Best Practices

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SSL certificates are an essential part of online security. They protect websites against hackers who try to steal information such as credit card numbers and passwords. In addition, they ensure that customers trust the site and its content.

Almost 50% of the top one million websites use HTTPS by default (they redirect inquiries of HTTP pages to URLs with HTTPS). (comodosslstore.com)As such, even pages that don’t deal with confidential data are being deployed using SSL. The underlying certificates to power the encryption are available from a variety of commercial providers, and even the pro-bono resource https://letsencrypt.org. No matter where you get your certificate from, here are a few resources for high-level best practices.

Trust Your Certificate Provider

Since certificates provide the basis for the cryptography for your site, their source is important. You can find a trustworthy list of providers for certificates here. https://www.techradar.com/news/best-ssl-certificate-provider. Beware of commercial providers not found on this list, as some of them may be sketchy at best, or dangerous at worst. Remember, the Let’s Encrypt project above is also highly trusted, even though they are not a commercial firm.

Manage Versions and Algorithms

Make sure you disable SSL and TLS 1.0 on the server. That version has known vulnerabilities. If possible, and there are no impacts on your users, consider removing 1.1 and 1.2 as well. 1.3 fixes a lot of the known issues with the protocol and supports only the known secure algorithms.

In cryptography, cipher suites play an important part in securing connections by enabling encryption at different levels. You shouldn’t be using an old version of a cryptographic protocol if there’s a newer one available; otherwise, you may put your site’s security at risk. Using secure cipher suites that support 128-bit (or more) encryption is crucial for securing sensitive client communications.

Diffie Hellman Key Exchange has been shown to be vulnerable when used for weaker keys; however, there is no known attack against stronger keys such as 2048-bits. Make sure you use the strongest settings possible for your server.

Manage and Maintain Certificate Expiration

As of Sept. 1, 2020, Apple’s Safari browser will no longer trust certificates with validity periods longer than 398 days, and other browsers are likely to follow suit. Reducing validity periods reduces the time period in which compromised or bogus certificates can be exploited. As such, any certificates using retired encryption algorithms or protocols will need to be replaced sooner. (searchsecurity.techtarget.com)

Maintain a spreadsheet or database of your certificate expiration dates for each relevant site. Make sure to check it frequently for expiring certificates to avoid user issues and browser error messages. Even better is to use an application or certificate management platform that alerts you in plenty of time to upcoming certificate expirations – thus, you can plan accordingly. Best of all, if possible, embrace tools and frameworks for automating certificate management and rotation – that makes sure that you are less likely to have expiration issues. Most popular web frameworks now have tools and plugins available to perform this for you.

Protect Your Certificates and Private Keys

Remember that your certificate is not only a basis for cryptography, but is also a source of identification and reputation. As such, you need to make sure that all certificates are stored properly, securely and in trusted locations. Make sure that web users can’t access the private certificate files, and that you have adequate back up and restore processes in place.

Make sure that you also protect the private keys used in certificate generation. Generate them offline, if possible, protect them with strong passwords and store them in a secure location. Generate a new private key for each certificate and each renewal cycle.

Revoke your certificate or keys as quickly as possible if you believe they have been compromised.

Following these best practices will go a long way to making your SSL certificate processes safer and more effective. Doing so protects your users, your reputation and your web sites. Make sure you check back with your certificate provider often, and follow any additional practices they suggest.

 

 

 

 

3 Quick Thoughts for Small Utilities and Co-Ops

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Recently I was asked to help some very small utilities and co-ops come up with some low cost/free ideas around detection. The group was very nice about explaining their issues, and here is a quick summary of some of the ideas we discussed.

1) Dump external router, firewall, AD and any remote access logs weekly to text and use simple parsers in python/perl or shell script to identify any high risk issues. Sure, this isn’t the same as having robust log monitoring tools (which none of these folks had), but even if you detect something really awful a week after it happens, you will still be ahead of the average curve of attackers having access for a month or more. You can build your scripts using some basis analytics, they will get better over time, and here are some ideas to get you started. You don’t need a lot of money to quickly handle dumped logs. Do the basics and improve.

2) Take advantage of cheap hardware, like the Raspberry Pi for easy to learn/use Linux boxes for scripting, log parsing or setting up cron jobs to automate tasks. For less than 50 bucks, you can have a powerful machine to do a lot of work for you and serve as a monitoring platform for a variety of tools. The group was all tied up in getting budget to buy server and workstation hardware – but had never taken the Pi seriously as a work platform. It’s mature enough to do a lot of non-mission critical (and some very important) work. It’s fantastic if you’re looking for a quick and dirty way to gain some Linux capabilities in confined Windows world.

3) One of the best bang for the buck services we have at MSI is device configuration reviews. For significantly less money than a penetration test, we can review your external routers, firewall and VPN for configuration issues, improper rules/ACLs and insecure settings. If you combine this with an exercise like attack surface mapping and threat modeling, you can get a significant amount of insight without resorting to (and paying for) vulnerability assessments and penetration testing. Sure, the data might not be as granular, and we still have to do some level of port scanning and service ID, but we have a variety of safe ways to do that work – and you get some great information. You can then make risk-based decisions about the data and decide what you want to act on and pay attention to. If your budget is tight – get in touch and discuss this approach with us.

I love to talk with utilities and especially smaller organizations that want to do the right thing, but might face budget constraints. If they’re willing to have an open, honest conversation, I am more than willing to get creative and engage to help them solve problems within their needs. We’d rather get creative and solve an issue to protect the infrastructure than have them get compromised by threat actors looking to do harm.

If you want to discuss this or any security or risk management issue, get in touch here.  

Network Segmentation with MachineTruth

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network segmentation with MachineTruth

About MachineTruthTM

We’ve just released a white paper on the topic of leveraging MachineTruth™, our proprietary network and device analytics platform, to segment or separate network environments.

Why Network Segmentation?

The paper covers the reasons to consider network segmentation, including the various drivers across clients and industries that we’ve worked with to date. It also includes a sample work flow to guide you through the process of performing segmentation with an analytics and modeling-focused solution, as opposed to the traditional plug and pray method, many organizations are using today.

Lastly, the paper covers how MachineTruthTM is different than traditional approaches and what you can expect from such a work plan.

To find out more:

If you’re considering network segmentation, analysis, inventory or mapping, then MachineTruthTM is likely a good fit for your organization. Download the white paper today and learn more about how to make segmentation easier, safer, faster and more affordable than ever before!

Interested? Download the paper here:

https://signup.microsolved.com/machinetruth-segmentation-wp/

As always, thanks for reading and we look forward to working with you. If you have any questions, please drop us a line (info@microsolved.com) or give us a call (614-351-1237) to learn more.

BEC #6 – Recovery

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A few weeks ago, we published the Business Email Compromise (BEC) Checklist. The question arose – what if you’re new to security, or your security program isn’t very mature?

Since the checklist is based on the NIST model, there’s a lot of information here to help your security program mature, as well as to help you mature as a security practitioner. MSI’s engineers have discussed a few ways to leverage the checklist as a growth mechanism.

Part 1 and Part 2 covered the first checkpoint in the list – Discover. Part 3 covered the next checkpoint – Protect. Part 4 continued the series – Detect. Part 5 addressed how to Respond.

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How do you Identify? Business Email Compromise #1

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Business Email Compromise

business email compromise

Recently, we posted the Business Email Compromise (BEC) checklist. We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on the checklist…as well as a few questions. What if you’re new to security? What if your organization’s security program is newer, and still maturing? How can you leverage this list?

Since the checklist is based on the NIST model, there’s a lot of information here to help your security program mature, as well as to help you mature as a security practitioner. MSI’s engineers have discussed a few ways to leverage the checklist as a growth mechanism.

Continue reading →