Introduction

Today I would to share something interesting we're working on: Risk/Availability/Vulnerability indicator Maps.

The purpose was to fit the most important information that can be gained from ossim all over it's interface, into a simple to use, simple to manage and simple to analyze interface.
We already had an approach to both, to using maps (images) and to aggregate/organize different input into meta-objets (what we called business processes). But, both of them had the same problem: they were complex and they were ugly.

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.

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

This post will be the first of a series of tutorials describing how to accompliush certain useful things using OSSIM. A friendly IT teacher from Oklahoma suggested that it would be a good idea, and I have to agree. And on top, it's relaxing :-).

So here we go, this first installment will focus on deploying OCS Inventory on a couple of hosts, getting them to log to the central ossim server and see how it shows up in our interface. This will demonstrate the powerful cross-platform inventory capabilities built into ossim thanks to the new OCS integration.

The test environment consists of 6 devices:

• Apple 10.5 Leopard
• Debian 4.0 Linux inside Parallels
• IPhone MacosX
• OpenBSD 4.x
• Windows XP inside Parallels
• Yellow Dog Linux running on a PS3