csirt-playbook
Disk Image Deception
Cisco’s Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) detected a large and ongoing malspam campaign leveraging the .IMG file extension to bypass automated malware analysis tools and infect machines with a variety of Remote Access Trojans. During our investigation, we observed multiple tacti…
Operational Security Intelligence
Security intelligence, threat intelligence, cyber threat intelligence, or “intel” for short is a popular topic these days in the Infosec world. It seems everyone has a feed of “bad” IP addresses and hostnames they want to sell you, or share. This is an encouraging trend in that it indicates the secu…
Using a “Playbook” Model to Organize Your Information Security Monitoring Strategy
CSIRT, I have a project for you. We have a big network and we’re definitely getting hacked constantly. Your group needs to develop and implement security monitoring to get our malware and hacking problem under control. If you’ve been a security engineer for more than a few years,…
To SIEM or Not to SIEM? Part II
The Great Correlate Debate SIEMs have been pitched in the past as “correlation engines” and their special algorithms can take in volumes of logs and filter everything down to just the good stuff. In its most basic form, correlation is a mathematical, statistical, or logical relationship…
To SIEM or Not to SIEM? Part I
Security information and event management systems (SIEM, or sometimes SEIM) are intended to be the glue between an organization’s various security tools. Security and other event log sources export their alarms to a remote collection system like a SIEM, or display them locally for direct acces…
Getting a Handle on Your Data
When your incident response team gets access to a new log data source, chances are that the events may not only contain an entirely different type of data, but may also be formatted differently than any log data source you already have. Having a data collection and organization standard will ease ma…
Making Boring Logs Interesting
In the last week alone, two investigations I have been involved with have come to a standstill due to the lack of attribution logging data. One investigation was halted due to the lack of user activity logging within an application, the other from a lack of network-based activity logs. Convincing th…
Big Security—Mining Mountains of Log Data to Find Bad Stuff
Your network, servers, and a horde of laptops have been hacked. You might suspect it, or you might think it’s not possible, but it’s happened already. What’s your next move? The dilemma of the “next move” is that you can only discover an attack either as it’s happ…