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Monitoring an adversary’s movements as it relates to your organization.
Your SIEM likely contains a great deal of information which can be mapped by country. That’s all you need to get started with a dashboard to see at a high level how those countries – or adversaries – are affecting your organization’s security posture.
Start with creating dashboards for the following, using Russia as an example:
outside > in: top destination IPs/domains FROM Russia
inside > out: top ip/domain sources TO Russia
users associated with any Russian IPs/domains.
asset mapping by criticality associated with Russian IPs (this asset list is likely something you’d have to build, but hopefully you’re already maintaining a good asset list)
timeline graph – all activity from all sources by volume over time associated with Russian IPs/domains
Some SIEMs are better than others with mapping IPs/domains to a country. Here’s a query example for doing it in Microsoft Sentinel on WAF events using a geoip reference table:
let geoData = materialize (externaldata(network:string,geoname_id:string,continent_code:string,continent_name:string, country_iso_code:string,country_name:string,is_anonymous_proxy:string,is_satellite_provider:string) [@"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/datasets/geoip2-ipv4/master/data/geoip2-ipv4.csv"] with (ignoreFirstRecord=true, format="csv")); let lookup = toscalar( geoData | summarize list_CIDR=make_set(network) ); AzureDiagnostics | where Category contains "ApplicationGateway" | where Message contains "Inbound Anomaly Score Exceeded" |summarize by clientIp_s | mv-apply list_CIDR=lookup to typeof(string) on ( where ipv4_is_match (clientIp_s, list_CIDR) //== false ) | join kind=rightouter (AzureDiagnostics | where TimeGenerated > ago(7d)) on clientIp_s | join kind=leftouter ( geoData ) on $left.list_CIDR == $right.network |summarize count() by clientIp_s, country_name, hostname_s |where clientIp_s <> "" |order by count_ desc | where country_name == "Russia" | where count_ >= 10
Next, research past history from attackers in that country. Go to Mitre’s ATT&CK site and search for the attack groups of interest:
The next step would be to go deeper and identify ‘entities’ that are specific to using these attacks, such as:
IP/domains from threat intel feeds
attacks/techniques that map to the above attack groups in the ATT&CK matrix. Click on the links above to see more details. (eg. T1059 – powershell scripting using Empire)
malware/endpoint (EDR) and network detections (proxy/nids/firewall) specific to the ATT&CK groups listed above. Many of these tools support ATT&CK mappings so with some luck you just have to create a list of the Mitre Technique numbers (eg. T1059) and you’re off.
Use the information above to create SIEM correlations. Add these alerts to your workbook/dashboard to show near real time detections as they are seen. Example correlations may include:
events mapping to a threat intel feed related to the adversaries in question
alerts related to 4 or more distinct Mitre Techniques in question.
EDR/IDS events mapping to the adversaries in question
malware NOT cleaned AND traffic to Russia or a known-bad-ip for the past 15 minutes.
SOAR example: create a playbook to map all alerts to APTs and TAG them as ‘MITRE APT: Russia’ use threat intel for the logic or another detection method)
Add metrics to your dashboard for management to see MTTD/MTTR (mean time to detect/respond).
If you manage a single cloud tenant with a single subscription, roles and responsibilities for security can usually be maintained by a small SecOps team.
But if your organization has dozens or hundreds of departments, the need for a much more hierarchical structure can quickly become difficult for a single security team to maintain control over.
So what can happen is departments are handed over the role of the security administrator for their own resources and users.
And before you know it, SecOps has lost control of who’s making changes to what.
Fear not, this isn’t a terrible thing, but it’s important to put checks in place to ensure simple practices are being followed.
One approach:
Perform a security audit that provides a list of the security categories of interest. (This audit should provide both high level and lower level topics, so you can easily end up with hundreds of checks). Example high level topics:
Identity & Access Controls
Logging, Monitoring and Reporting
Data Protection
Network Security
Endpoint Protection
Inventory Management
Configuration Management
Vulnerability Management
Create a list of relevant security checks from the above audit (this checklist is much shorter than the original security audit, since these departmental security admins have a much smaller list of security responsibilities).
Identify a security owner for each relevant department/group
Require each security owner to perform periodic checks and report back to the SecOps team.
Not only does the above approach provide clear security checks/responsibilities to the security owners, but it gives the SecOps team a way to track security in a growing organization without getting overwhelmed. It also ensures that as security owners come and go from the organization, that the new owners will be quickly identified by the SecOps team, thus avoiding gaps in maintaining security controls.
Once you understand the basics you might consider these points as a starting approach:
Perform a ‘cyber resilience maturity audit’
Using 800-160 V2 create a checklist to discuss and better understand your organization’s maturity around cyber resiliency.
Identify security tools to enable and improve on your cyber resiliency, eg:
Microsoft Defender for Cloud – Use the built in NIST regulatory standsards to enforce configuration of resources with resilience – eg. don’t allow VMs without backups enabled and redundancy features configured.
O365 Compliance Manager – Create assessments using the NIST templates to identify misconfigurations.
Microsoft Secure Scores – use the several available Secure Scores in O365 and Azure to improve security posture.
Sentinel – Configure alerts to monitor resiliency related issues.
Areas in red can be monitored using Sentinel and Defender for Cloud (and possibly more, just what I know about):
Here is where 800-160 refers to other NIST controls, some of which are templates within Defender for cloud and O365 Compliance Manager (800-70 and 800-37 are premium templates so extra $$):
logger -p local4.warn -t CEF “CEF:0|Microsoft|ATA|1.9.0.0|AbnormalSensitiveGroupMembershipChangeSuspiciousActivity|Abnormal modification of sensitive groups|5|start=2018-12-12T18:52:58.0000000Z app=GroupMembershipChangeEvent suser=krbtgt msg=krbtgt has uncharacteristically modified sensitive group memberships. externalId=2024 cs1Label=url cs1=https://192.168.0.220/suspiciousActivity/5c113d028ca1ec1250ca0491“
Then replace the sample log with your own and see if it also gets through.
Also verify that if you remove your rsyslog CEF filter that the logs at least get to syslog. If they do, then it’s possible this is an unsupported CEF format. Which isn’t terrible because you can still parse the logs using KQL.
To check if your logs are event getting to your syslog server use tcpdump eg: tcpdump -i any port syslog -A -s0 -nn
And note that you could be seeing your logs with the above tcpdump command but they’re still not getting to Sentinel. In that case check if the local firewall rules are blocking syslog.
If you find out it’s an unsupported CEF format it’s still possible to fix but it likely involves regex changes to the rsyslog configuration in security_events.conf or elsewhere. (see reference below).
Simple-Security 