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This keeps happening over and over, and we aren't really covering this as much as we should: Readers finally heed our advise and look at their logs! Now this should make us proud and glad. But then the bad thing happens: They have no idea what they are looking at, and the logs look scary. So the conclusion is "I am hacked!". People stop working and their only goal is to get back a clean system which they find impossible to achieve. For some people, this even results in them becoming unemployed, or worse: They become security professionals. With this introduction, I got a challenge for you: Take a system that you reasonably believe to be "clean". Find some logs that make you think otherwise, and try to explain them. To get started, here some from my iMac desktop that I use to type this diary:
Even after a full 5 minutes with Google, I am kind of at a loss as to what this means. In my opinion it is nothing to worry about, but then again, that is just my "impression".
Seems like a coding bug in Safari to me. Why? Well, WebKit is the rendering engine behind Safari, and Safari runs inside a sandbox on OS X. But why does it try to read "com.apple.security-common.plist"? Looks bad. Maybe I am just doing this too long to still care about some of these messages. Sure looks dangerous to someone who still does care. So what are your favorite non-events? How do you figure out what is a problem and what isn't? Do we need a database of log messages with translations? And remember,
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Johannes 3733 Posts ISC Handler |
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May 29th 2014 5 years ago |
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OSSEC HIDS Notification.
2014 May 28 21:49:33 Received From: xxxxxxxx->rootcheck Rule: 510 fired (level 7) -> "Host-based anomaly detection event (rootcheck)." Portion of the log(s): Files hidden inside directory '/dev'. Link count does not match number of files (4,88). This one always raises eyebrows. |
Chavez243 15 Posts |
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May 29th 2014 5 years ago |
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Wow...I just had a major flashback to the SANS paper I wrote many years ago. I speak to this very point you highlight in this entry.
http://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/logging/importance-understanding-logs-information-security-standpoint-200 Since I have written that paper, logging standards and formatting has improved greatly, but it is still a challenge. Log correlation tools like SPLUNK can help a lot, but at the end of the day, you still need to be able to interpret these. One line in an event log can mean the difference between identifying the trigger to an incident or missing it completely. |
Stewart 1 Posts |
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May 29th 2014 5 years ago |
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I have yet to see any OS log that isn't full of useless noise, some of it downright hilarious. I did a search in my OS X 10.9.3 logs for "secur" and found this gem -- will I be safe in a crash without my seatbelt-profiles?
com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[200]: (com.apple.EscrowSecurityAlert) Unknown key: seatbelt-profiles I always have a hard time convincing sysadmins to fix things that are just noise due to simple configuration issues, 'why bother?' is the usual response. Then when we have to do some forensics they bemoan the search taking so long through their ginormous logs.... |
Paul 44 Posts |
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May 30th 2014 5 years ago |
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Can we look at this from another angle?
What events do we want to encourage sysadmins and developers to log? Sure, login/access failures are assumed to be part of the record but what else? |
Sassan 4 Posts |
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May 30th 2014 5 years ago |
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Paul: I think this is a great example. The problem is that in some cases (too many cases?) these aren't fixable, and sometimes not even "errors" but notices.
Sassan: I think it is not so much as to what to log, but how to log. I think there need to be well defined log levels ('debug','warnings','errors','security'...) that should be logged with the event. Next, there should be some documentation allowing a user to parse the logs. |
Johannes 3733 Posts ISC Handler |
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May 30th 2014 5 years ago |
Quoting Paul:... Can't agree more. It's like trying to find the needle in the haystack all while having someone dump more hay on top of you. |
cnorris 1 Posts |
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May 30th 2014 5 years ago |
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@Dr. J.
"Do we need a database of log messages with translations?..." If you go to eventid.net the site will allow you to event a Windows event ID and then read what other users have said about that ID. It's not a comprehensive database but always a start for me. No I'm not affiliated with eventid.net just a happy user of their site. |
PW 63 Posts |
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May 30th 2014 5 years ago |
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This is one of the primary points of Sagan (http://sagan.quadrantsec.com). The idea is to use a "collective" of knowledge to assist with detection. The example I like to give is a user with Splunk/Envision/etc looking for "authentication failures". In many cases, the user of these tools will search for terms like "authentication failure", "login incorrect", etc. However, if they have Oracle databases within their network, did they search for "ORA-1017" (Oracle Code for "authentication failure")? Not likely and _why_ would they know to search for this?
Sagan has a lot of rules and is used to help security staff detect anomalies in real time. Sagan does _not_ attempt to replace tools like Splunk, which are incredibly useful. It's a tool to aid administrators in "understanding" logs. It is also an open source project :) |
PW 9 Posts |
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Jun 4th 2014 5 years ago |
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