I'm writing these lines to cheer at my co-worker (@AlienVault) Santiago "Santi" Gonzalez, who went to Bogota for a couple of weeks in order to implement OSSIM as security event and information monitoring solution at Campus Party in Colombia.
I know this place is lacking some "useful" content lately, but I expect to have a bit more time in a couple of weeks; have had a huge workload lately.

Back to the party. You can check out some pictures at Flickr, it's quite of a mess but I'll try to update this entry tomorrow with some interesting pictures.

The two guys we've hired from a company at Bogotá in order to give us local asistance over there also have started posting on a couple of blogs created specifically for this event:

Warning: they're in pseudo-spanish/english.

• ossim colombia
• ossim campus party

So, as always this is a nice place to test ossim, do some benchmarks and improve some stuff. The party in Valencia is due to the end of this month and we hope we'll be there too :-)

Last but not least, a big hug to my friends in Turkiye. Another co-worker (Juanma) has been there a couple of weeks ago doing some training; he's enjoyed it alot and I hope the people undergoing the ossim training too.

We've decided to start working on an alternative Nessus feed after Tenable having changed licensing again.

Excluding even non-profit organizations and testing purposes completely from the feed seems contrary to the open source spirits, so we'll be investing a considerable amount of effort and money into providing a high quality feed for everyone.

The final workings of it is still unclear, but we're aiming at the Sourcefire model: if you subscribe you'll get them instantly, everybody else gets them with a slight delay (we're discussing a one to four week delay).

One of the goals we've got is getting a good bunch of people interested on this and willing to participate (sort of a Consortium maybe, although we're starting it internally right now) so if you could please share this with people who could have the skill/knowledge to contribute to this, I'd be more than grateful.

Last but not least we're looking into a way of ensuring that the effort put into this by everyone won't be abused in any ways, so if anybody has got suggestions about model/licensing/etc it would be great to hear them.

Adding a small slashdot badge too, this could be good to draw some attention on it and attract collaborators.

I've got some tests to do with a Cisco 6513 ACE-10 card. My testing environment is very limited and I'd greatly appreciate getting some feedback from someone knowledgeable with that thing.

Having someone help me setup a quick test environment with two hosts balancing http would be awesome of course, but any help is greatly appreciated.

Should you have any feedback please contact me at dk@ossim.net. TYIA.

I'm proud to announce the avilability of our brand new forum infrastructure. We were getting really tired in the end by the lack of features of the sf.net forums, so we decided to setup FUDForum on ossim.net

I for myself am very motivated by this changes, I was getting crazy with the old environment and promised myselft to answer many more things on these new forums.
Enjoy: ossim.net forums.

Yay ! we're proud to announce that ossim has been chosen to take part int he google summer of code program. Brian, now it's your turn ;-).
I'll post another entry when we've got more information about how this works.

Congratulations!
Your organization "OSSIM: Open Source Security Information Management" has been accepted in to the 
Google Summer of Code(tm) 2008. You have been assigned as primary point of contact and as an 
administrator for your organization.
please visit http://code.google.com/soc/mentor_step1.html and sign up using your Google Account.
Thanks.
- Your friendly Google Summer of Code administrators

Remember the couple of posts I made back in November in the tuning section ? Well, I finally got the time to look into this issue again and have made some interesting discoveries the last couple of days. I'm really enjoying this.

The following table illustrates some comparisons between a stock Base 1.3.9 (ossim patched) and the tuned rewrite I've got running right now. These optimizations are now part of our appliance offering (updates for already deployed ones on the way) and will be released to the public afterwards. Thanks to everybody that has been helping me on this, specially to the people at #ossim in freenode ;-).

A couple of days ago I was fixing the fortinet/fortigate with the kind help of a Swiss OSSIM user (thanks Mikael ;-) ) and I wrote this little piece of python in order to help me out with it. Now I'm using it a lot to debug plugins so I guess more people could benefit from this also :-)
And well, I'll paste a sample plugin debugging session in order to give ideas.
BTW, this assumes basic knowledge of regular expressions, check this Regexp Primer out if you want to refresh that knowledge. And BTW2, some log lines are broken for readability.

We just switched offices, the old one was getting too small. Here is a picture where we're still setting up everything, taken from my seat holding up the pc, showing various AlienVault staff testing wifi, hanging around or just tryting to avoid the hard work :-)

I wanted to point you at two things I think that are important, things that we've been neglecting in the past months.

1. IRC Channel: we've ignored this way of communication for quite some time but enough of that, I added a "fire up BitchX" postit on my desk so from now on I'll spend as much time there as I can, and hopefully other ossim users / developers too. See you at irc.freenode.org, channel #ossim
2. Bug tracking mechanism: honestly, I never liked the one provided by sf.net so I followed a suggestion from a friendly guy at #ossim and installed FlySpray as a bug tracking system. Check it out at http://www.ossim.net/bugs/ (Need to add the virtualhost for bugs.ossim.net :-) ).

We've released OSSIM 0.9.9 this week, release which was followed by a post to BugTraq regarding some XSS and SQL vulnerabilities present on OSSIM.
After having fixed those vulnerabilities we're now releasing:

• OSSIM Installer 1.0.4 (the recommended installation method)
• OSSIM Updater 1.0.4 (the recommended updating method for those running versions 1.0 - 1.0.3)
• OSSIM 0.9.9-3 Debian packages.
• OSSIM 0.9.9p1 for those who need source code.

We're proud to announce the soon-to-be-available 1.0.4 installer (versioning wise it could be 1.1 or even higher because of all of the changes but, well, we called it 1.0.4), both as a standalone ISO image as well as the updater.

We've been working very hard the past months on this, the updater has been a nightmare. It's much easier to make an installer than an updater...

For those wanting to try it out, just download update.pl and run it on a 1.0 - 1.0.3 installed image (should work with the images we've released inbetween on the forums too). Be warned tho, we're still on final testing phases and there might be some issues in there, any sort of testing will be more than welcome.

Basically the installer will backup all the databases and /etc/*, /usr/share/ossim*, install new packages (ossim 0.9.9), new deps (ossec, munin, fprobe) and tune some other things.
Anyway, as said, there are backups and it shouldn't be too hard to get it back working if something fails.

A few hints if you're going to try it out:

• Default values for most of questions are fine. If unsure just press enter.
• "auto" is the recommended way to go for new users, "expert" allows for a more fine grained setup.
• We experienced occassional hangs at the munin plugin setup step. Had to kill the following process on another terminal in order to continue with the installation process
• After everything has been installed you have to log in and upgrade the web part, it should work like a charm :-)
• Right now requires internet access; we'll publish an offline updater too of course

Check a sample installer output if you're curious.

Here is a more detailed list of the most important changes:

New software:

• Included OSSEC (http://www.ossec.net/)
• Included Munin for sensor monitorization (http://munin.projects.linpro.no/)
• Included FProbe for high traffic environments (http://fprobe.sourceforge.net/)
• OSSIM core upgrade
• Included and updated bleeding snort rules

• Intrushield plugin
• Ntop connections being rewritten through the server, no need to open port 3000 to then anymore.
• Partitioning switched to manual on installation
• Database optimization code included
• Added some database indexes for query speedup
• Updater support
• Experimental agent event consolidation
• Agent event statistics

• Updated realsecure/proventia plugin
• Updated FW1 plugin
• Update IIS plugin
• Database types optimized
• Updated pam_unix rules
• Updated ssh rules
• Updated cross correlation information

• Localization now working
• Fixed some server issues

After having spent five days in this nice city I wanted to say goodbye through a post. It's the second time I went here (sadly both times I had to work but I'll come back for fun someday, that for sure) and I really enjoyed the stay.

This time I had a nicer Hotel than last time, right in the city center. Although I didn't enjoy the breakfast at the hotel a single day (I'd rather sleep 15 mins longer) I'll remember these days again for the food: unending mountains of food at all hours.
Last night we went to the Garibaldi which was a delicious goodbye dinner with live music. Besides that not much more to tell, intense but fun work, some WoW, some traffic jams, missing my girlfriend a real lot and kebaps, kebaps, kebaps...

A hearty greeting to my friends in Istanbul. You've tried to make me explode with food but again you didn't succeeed.
Which reminds me, this time I've learned the trick. It's considered bad manner to refuse a dish when getting it offered, and you get it continously. But if you offer back insistently then they'll think about it twice when feeding you up.

While I write these lines the Muezzin are calling to prayer. It's an interesting sound and reminds me that although very similar to our city, it's still quite a different culture. (I'm pretty sure I've heard that article ending before, inside a "Lonely planet" issue or something like that :P)

Recently I stumbled across an interesting article talking about Microsoft, Opensource and ITIL where ossim was being mentioned. (the article can also be found googling for "ossim itil microsoft" in case the link breaks).

I've never been very keen about learning ITIL either (although I've heard about it everywhere during the last year) but this really caught my attention. In that paper ossim gets referenced only on the "security management" section, but I think that's mainly caused by ossim being hard to install, setup and understand when that article was written, so I thought I give it another try from my point of view, taking the included tools into account for the different ITIL sections.

So, the goal of this article would be to extend and improve that other article, giving a thought about how I'd approach all those ITIL recommendations from an OSSIM point of view.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library is comprised by two main sets and a series of subsets (from what I've read on that article and the wikipedia):

• Service Support
• Service Delivery

Note: The definitions after each topic have been quoted from the MS article since they're small and concise.

Happy new year to everybody.

After moving together with my lovely girlfriend, spending some time with the family during the holidays and getting my undead warlock to lvl 54 it's time to get back to work.

We've got many exciting things in mind involving ossim for 2008 and quite a bit of surprises (positive ones of course :-) ). During the next couple of months we're going to focus on:

• Releasing a new installer version. Starting with 1.0.4 we'll also supply upgrade tools so no worries, it won't be necessary to download and reinstall the whole thing again.
• Further improving documentation. We intend to release online courses soon for remote training, including vmware laboratories.
• Improving ossim. Fixing bugs :-)

The windows event log

As an introduction to windows event logging I recommend reading the following article: Monitoring and Troubleshooting Using Event Logs. It's the first interesting one I've found after googling for an introduction.

Quoting the article, which also talks about EventCombMT.exe which we'll mention later:

This article reviews best practices for working with Windows event logs including how to interpret 
event messages, how to configure event logs, how to search and filter events, how to view events on 
remote systems, and how to use EventCombMT.exe and other tools to monitor events on multiple systems.

Introduction

In order to answer to a recent forum post I had to do a quick research since it had been some time since I last tested this.
The exact question was:

Hello,

Is there a document talking about how the directives are processed?  One question
that I have is if you have multiple directives created and an event comes in
that matches the initial states of more than a single directive will both actually
process the event, or only the first match (which I think is the case)?

Thanks for any clarification you can provide.

Stephen

• SSH password failed (plugin_sid 1)
• SSH password accepted (plugin_sid 7)

• Test directive 21, grouping one login failure and one success
• Test directive 22, grouping one login failure and one success
• Test directive 23, used in the second case, grouping those two

This tutorial tries to show the first common steps you could perform if you're new to ossim and just finished installation, without knowing what to do next.
The tutorial will cover:

• Policies
• Initial Inventory
• Scans
• Scheduled scans
• What to do next

1. The need. The Hype.

Compliance

• ISO27001/17799
• SOX
• HIPAA
• PCI
• Basel II
• NIST 800-53
• Many more...

Centralized logging

Data mining

Some time ago, earlier this year, I had the opportunity to attend to a conference where one of the leading SIM vendors (according to gartner's magic quadrant at least) talked about their product. Although my opinion will always be biased and I tend to compare all that I see on this area with OSSIM, I also believe that I've got a solid base to judge others.
Anyway, since I know myself and making a review comparing more than five years of work with a 5 hour demo and some document browsing isn't fair, I won't say the name of this product.