Coming soon to Security Onion: Elastic Agent Deployment via MSI!

Our upcoming Security Onion 2.4.120 release includes a new MSI option for deploying the Elastic Agent to your Windows endpoints! 

Security Onion 2.4.120 is coming soon!

Coming soon to Security Onion: ATT&CK Navigator Improvements!

Our upcoming Security Onion 2.4.120 release includes improvements for our ATT&CK Navigator integration! Navigator will now have 4 tabs across the top:

• Detections Coverage - All Detections
• Detections Coverage - Sigma
• Detections Coverage - Suricata
• Alerts (Last 3 Days)

Each tab will highlight coverage based on the title of the tab. Also, there are new pivots called View Related Detections and View Related Alerts that allow you to pivot from Navigator back to Detections and Alerts, respectively.

Security Onion 2.4.120 is coming soon!

Coming soon to Security Onion Pro: External API!

Our upcoming Security Onion 2.4.120 release includes a new feature for Security Onion Pro customers! If you have a valid Pro license, you will be able to connect to the Security Onion API from external API clients. This means that you can create cases, pull PCAPs, or acknowledge alerts using automation!

Coming soon: Zeek 7 and support for more protocols like QUIC, HTTP2, OpenVPN, and IPSEC!

Our upcoming Security Onion 2.4.120 release includes Zeek 7! It also adds support for analyzing more network protocols like QUIC, HTTP2, OpenVPN, and IPSEC!

Coming soon: tune alerts without leaving the Alerts interface!

Our Detections interface makes it easy to tune your rules, but have you ever wanted to tune your rules right from the Alerts interface? 

This will be included in Security Onion 2.4.120 which is coming soon!

Coming soon: AI Summaries in Alerts!

In October, we released Security Onion 2.4.110 and it included a new AI Summary feature in our Detections interface:

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/10/security-onion-24110-hurricane-helene.html

Over the last few months, we've continued to iterate on that AI Summary feature to make it available in the Alerts interface without having to pivot to Detections!

This will be included in Security Onion 2.4.120 which is coming soon!

Security Onion 2.4.111 now available!

In October, we released version 2.4.110:

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/10/security-onion-24110-hurricane-helene.html

Last week, Suricata 7.0.8 was released and it resolves several security issues:

https://suricata.io/2024/12/12/suricata-7-0-8-released/

Today, we are releasing Security Onion 2.4.111 which includes Suricata 7.0.8:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/release-notes.html

Known Issues

For a list of known issues, please see:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/release-notes.html#known-issues

Existing 2.4 Installations

If you have an existing Security Onion 2.4 installation, you can update to the latest version using soup:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/soup.html

Before updating your production deployment, we highly recommend testing the upgrade process on a test deployment that closely matches your production deployment if possible. This is especially important for releases that update components like Salt and Elastic.

New Installations

If this is your first time installing Security Onion 2.4, then we highly recommend starting with an IMPORT installation as shown at:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/first-time-users.html

Once you’re comfortable with your IMPORT installation, then you can move on to more advanced installations as shown at:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/architecture.html

Documentation

You can find our online documentation here:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/

Documentation is always a work in progress. If you find documentation that needs to be updated, please let us know as described in the Feedback section below.

Questions, Problems, and Feedback

If you have any questions or problems relating to Security Onion 2.4, please use the 2.4 category at our Discussions site:

https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions/securityonion/discussions/categories/2-4

Security Onion Pro

We recently celebrated 10 years in business by announcing Security Onion Pro:

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/07/celebrating-10-years-of-security-onion.html

Security Onion Pro includes many enterprise features that folks have been asking for:

• Open ID Connect (OIDC)
• Data at Rest Encryption
• FIPS for the OS
• DoD STIG for the OS
• External Notifications in SOC
• Time Tracking inside of Cases
• Guaranteed Message Delivery

You can read more about these enterprise features at:

https://securityonion.com/pro

Training

Need training? Start with our free Security Onion Essentials training and then take a look at some of our other official Security Onion training!

https://securityonion.net/training

Security Onion Solutions Hardware Appliances

We know Security Onion's hardware needs, and our appliances are the perfect match for the platform. Leave the hardware research, testing, and support to us, so you can focus on what's important for your organization. Not only will you have confidence that your Security Onion deployment is running on the best-suited hardware, you will also be supporting future development and maintenance of the Security Onion project!

https://securityonionsolutions.com/hardware

State of the Onion 2024

We usually have our State of the Onion at the annual Security Onion Conference, but we had to cancel the conference due to Hurricane Helene. As we wrap up 2024, it's a good time to review what we've accomplished in 2024!

Security Onion Pro

We celebrated 10 years as a company by announcing a new set of enterprise features called Security Onion Pro!

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/07/celebrating-10-years-of-security-onion.html

2.3

Security Onion 2.3 reached End Of Life (EOL) and is no longer supported. If you are still running 2.3, please migrate to Security Onion 2.4 as soon as possible:

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/04/security-onion-23-has-reached-end-of.html

Videos

Collecting Endpoint Logs with Elastic Agent

https://youtu.be/cGmQMsFuAvw

Ingesting PFSense Firewall Logs in Security Onion 2.4

https://youtu.be/aoH8qZwAxek

Security Onion Essentials 2024

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/08/security-onion-essentials-2024.html

Tuning Rules with Security Onion Detections

https://youtu.be/DelAmqtU2hg

Releases

We managed to crank out 8 releases of Security Onion 2.4! These releases added things like our new Detections interface, AI summaries, and lots of dashboard updates!

2.4.40

SOC Grid improvements, Dashboards/Hunt improved Events table columns, new analyzers for Cases

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/01/security-onion-2440-now-available.html

2.4.50

New Community ID and Firewall Auth dashboards, improved Correlate action, new Process ancestors action

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/02/security-onion-2450-now-available.html

2.4.60

New Process Info action, more endpoint support, new dashboards, BETA Suricata PCAP

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/03/security-onion-2460-now-available.html

2.4.70

Detections, Telemetry, ElastAlert notifications, more dashboards, Suricata 7.0.5, CyberChef 10.17.0, Zeek 6.0.4

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/05/security-onion-2470-now-available.html

2.4.80

Kafka, Docker upgrade, Detections improvements

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/06/security-onion-2480-now-available.html

2.4.90

Detections improvements, updates for Suricata, CyberChef, so-idh, so-nginx

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/07/security-onion-2490-now-available.html

2.4.100

Elastic 8.14.3, resolve security issues in Docker images

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/08/security-onion-24100-now-available.html

2.4.110

AI Summaries, Docker 27.2.0, Zeek 6.0.8, CyberChef 10.19.2, Standalone Suricata PCAP

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/10/security-onion-24110-hurricane-helene.html

Coming Soon

We are working on version 2.4.120 and it is currently scheduled to release in early 2025. It will include lots of new features that will help you peel back the layers of your enterprise and make your adversaries cry!

Quick Malware Analysis: AGENTTESLA VARIANT USING FTP pcap from 2024-12-04

Thanks to Brad Duncan for sharing this pcap from 2024-12-04 on his malware traffic analysis site! Due to issues with Google flagging a warning for the site, we're not including the actual hyperlink but it should be easy to find.

We did a quick analysis of this pcap using Security Onion 2.4.110:

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/10/security-onion-24110-hurricane-helene.html

If you'd like to follow along, you can do the following:

• install Security Onion 2.4.110 in a VM:
  https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/first-time-users.html
• import the pcap using the SOC Grid interface:
  https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/grid.html#icons-in-lower-left-corner
• optionally enable the DNS lookups feature:
  https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/soc-customization.html?#reverse-dns-lookups

The screenshots at the bottom of this post show some of the interesting alerts, metadata logs, and session transcripts. Want more practice? Check out our other Quick Malware Analysis posts at:

https://blog.securityonion.net/search/label/quick%20malware%20analysis

About Security Onion

Security Onion is a versatile and scalable platform that can run on small virtual machines and can also scale up to the opposite end of the hardware spectrum to take advantage of extremely powerful server-class machines.  Security Onion can also scale horizontally, growing from a standalone single-machine deployment to a full distributed deployment with tens or hundreds of machines as dictated by your enterprise visibility needs. To learn more about Security Onion, please see:
https://securityonion.net

Screenshots

First, we start with the overview of all alerts and logs:

Next, let's look at just the alerts:

Let's drill into the ET MALWARE AgentTesla Exfil via FTP alert:

Let's pivot to full packet capture for the stream:

Switching to ASCII transcript makes it easier to read:

Let's see the related Zeek FTP logs:

We see the same TCP stream as the alert but we also see a new one so let's pivot to PCAP:

Now let's look at the FTP Data:

Here are the actual files transferred:

Cyber Monday Discount for Security Onion Merch and On-Demand Training!

We are thankful for our customers and community! As a way of saying thanks, we'd like to offer you a Cyber Monday discount on our merch store and on-demand training library! This discount is good for 25% off any merch, any single on-demand course, or any on-demand bundle. This discount expires on December 25, 2024 at 11:59 PM ET. Not valid with any other offer.

Discount code:

CYBERMONION24

Merch store:

https://securityonion.com/merch

On-demand training:

https://securityonion.com/ondemandtraining

Did You Know Security Onion Scales to the Enterprise?

Did you know Security Onion scales to the enterprise? Security Onion is designed to scale from simple standalone deployments all the way up to large distributed deployments for your enterprise! Here are some of our enterprise use cases:

For the complete list of use cases, please see the Use Cases section of our documentation:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/use-cases.html#use-cases

10% Early Bird discount for Security Onion Fundamentals for Analysts & Admins Class in January 2025!

We've scheduled the next run of our 4-day Security Onion Fundamentals for Analysts & Admins class!

Use promo code earlybird by December 3, 2024 to receive 10% off!

For more details and to register, please see:

https://securityonionjan2025.eventbrite.com/

If you have any questions about this class, please use the Contact link on the bottom of the Eventbrite page.

For other training options, please see:

https://securityonionsolutions.com/training/

Did you know Security Onion provides a customized Elastic Agent that makes deployment easier?

Did you know Security Onion provides a customized Elastic Agent that makes deployment easier?

Check out our Elastic Agent documentation:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/elastic-agent.html

Also see our Elastic Agent video:

https://youtu.be/cGmQMsFuAvw 

Did you know Security Onion works for several different use cases?

Did you know Security Onion works for several different use cases from minimal deployments all the way up to large enterprise deployments? Here are just a few of the smaller deployment use cases:

For a longer list, please see the Use Cases section of our documentation:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/use-cases.html#use-cases

Security Onion Documentation printed book now updated for Security Onion 2.4.110!

We've been offering our Security Onion documentation in book form on Amazon for a few years and it's now been updated for the recently released Security Onion 2.4.110!

Thanks to Richard Bejtlich for writing the inspiring foreword!

Proceeds go to the Rural Technology Fund!

This edition has been updated for Security Onion 2.4.110 and includes a 10% discount code for Security Onion Pro and a 20% discount code for our on-demand training and certification!

This book covers the following Security Onion topics:

• First Time Users
• Getting Started
• Security Onion Console (SOC)
• Security Onion Desktop
• Network Visibility
• Additional Network Visibility
• Host Visibility
• Third Party Integrations
• Rules
• Logs
• Updating
• Accounts
• Services
• Customizing for Your Environment
• Tricks and Tips
• Utilities
• Help

Q&A

What is the difference between this book and the online documentation?

This book is the online documentation formatted specifically for print. It also includes an inspiring foreword by Richard Bejtlich that is not available anywhere else! Proceeds go to the Rural Technology Fund! Finally, the printed book includes a 10% discount code for Security Onion Pro and a 20% discount code for our on-demand training and certification.

Who should get this book?

You should get this book if you work on airgap networks or simply want a portable reference that doesn't require an Internet connection or batteries! Also anyone who wants to donate to a worthy cause like Rural Technology Fund!

What is the difference between this edition and the previous edition?

This edition has been updated for Security Onion 2.4.110!

Where do we get it?

https://securityonion.com/book

Security Onion 2.4.110 Hotfix 20241010 now available!

On Monday, we released version 2.4.110:

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/10/security-onion-24110-hurricane-helene.html

That release had an issue that affected a small percentage of users with custom policies:

https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions/securityonion/issues/13795

Today, we are releasing a hotfix which resolves this issue:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/release-notes.html

Known Issues

For a list of known issues, please see:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/release-notes.html#known-issues

Existing 2.4 Installations

If you have an existing Security Onion 2.4 installation, you can update to the latest version using soup:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/soup.html

Before updating your production deployment, we highly recommend testing the upgrade process on a test deployment that closely matches your production deployment if possible. This is especially important for releases that update components like Salt and Elastic.

New Installations

If this is your first time installing Security Onion 2.4, then we highly recommend starting with an IMPORT installation as shown at:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/first-time-users.html

Once you’re comfortable with your IMPORT installation, then you can move on to more advanced installations as shown at:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/architecture.html

Documentation

You can find our online documentation here:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/

Documentation is always a work in progress. If you find documentation that needs to be updated, please let us know as described in the Feedback section below.

Questions, Problems, and Feedback

If you have any questions or problems relating to Security Onion 2.4, please use the 2.4 category at our Discussions site:

https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions/securityonion/discussions/categories/2-4

Security Onion Pro

We recently celebrated 10 years in business by announcing Security Onion Pro:

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/07/celebrating-10-years-of-security-onion.html

Security Onion Pro includes many enterprise features that folks have been asking for:

• Open ID Connect (OIDC)
• Data at Rest Encryption
• FIPS for the OS
• DoD STIG for the OS
• External Notifications in SOC (this feature got even better in this release!)
• Time Tracking inside of Cases
• Guaranteed Message Delivery

You can read more about these enterprise features at:

https://securityonion.com/pro

Training

Need training? Start with our free Security Onion Essentials training and then take a look at some of our other official Security Onion training!

https://securityonion.net/training

Security Onion Solutions Hardware Appliances

We know Security Onion's hardware needs, and our appliances are the perfect match for the platform. Leave the hardware research, testing, and support to us, so you can focus on what's important for your organization. Not only will you have confidence that your Security Onion deployment is running on the best-suited hardware, you will also be supporting future development and maintenance of the Security Onion project!

https://securityonionsolutions.com/hardware

Security Onion 2.4.110 now available including new AI Summary feature and much more!

Hurricane Helene Update

On Friday, September 27, Hurricane Helene hit Augusta GA. All of our team members are safe, but many folks had significant property damage and were without power and Internet access for several days. Due to the amount of damage to the Augusta region, we had no choice but to cancel all Augusta Cyber Week activities including our 4-day Security Onion training class, our annual Security Onion Conference, and BSidesAugusta.

We are truly thankful for the countless men and women who have worked tirelessly over the last week to restore power and other services to our area. At this point, most of our team members have power although some still do not have reliable Internet access. We are all starting the long process of slowly repairing the property damage that this brutal storm caused.

We sincerely appreciate all those who reached out to check on us. Several folks have asked how they can help support Security Onion Solutions during this time. For individuals, please consider donating to the Red Cross to help others in need. If your organization would like to help support Security Onion Solutions directly, please consider purchasing Security Onion Pro. Thank you!

Security Onion 2.4.110

Hurricane Helene may have cancelled our training class and conferences, but it couldn't cancel this release! Security Onion 2.4.110 is now available and includes a brand new AI Summary feature and much more!

Have you ever looked at a NIDS, YARA, or Sigma rule and didn't quite understand what the rule was looking for? Our default rules now make this easier with new human readable summaries generated by AI! For example, here is a NIDS rule followed by its new AI summary:

Here is a Sigma rule followed by its new AI summary:

Finally, here is a YARA rule followed by its new AI summary:

Another new feature is allowing external access to Suricata rules managed by Detections. This allow you to manage your Suricata NIDS rules in Detections and then allow a third-party system to pull those rules. An example would be OPNsense which can pull our Suricata rules, generate NIDS alerts, and then send those NIDS alerts to Secuity Onion where they show up in our SOC Alerts page. For more information, please see the OPNsense section of the documentation:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/opnsense.html

In addition, we've updated several components including:

• CyberChef 10.19.2
• Docker 27.2.0
• ElastAlert 2.20.0
• Kratos 1.3.0
• Suricata 7.0.7
• Zeek 6.0.8

There are many more features and fixes included in this release! For a complete list of all changes, please see the Release Notes:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/release-notes.html#changes

Known Issues

For a list of known issues, please see:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/release-notes.html#known-issues

About Security Onion

Security Onion is a free and open platform built by defenders for defenders. It includes network visibility, host visibility, intrusion detection honeypots, log management, and case management. 

For network visibility, we offer signature based detection via Suricata, rich protocol metadata and file extraction using your choice of either Zeek or Suricata, full packet capture, and file analysis. For host visibility, we offer the Elastic Agent which provides data collection, live queries via osquery, and centralized management using Elastic Fleet. Intrusion detection honeypots based on OpenCanary can be added to your deployment for even more enterprise visibility. All of these logs flow into Elasticsearch and we’ve built our own user interfaces for alerts, dashboards, threat hunting, case management, and grid management. 

Security Onion has been downloaded over 2 million times and is being used by security teams around the world to monitor and defend their enterprises. Our easy-to-use Setup wizard allows you to build a distributed grid for your enterprise in minutes!

Documentation

You can find our online documentation here:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/

Documentation is always a work in progress. If you find documentation that needs to be updated, please let us know as described in the Feedback section below.

New Installations

If this is your first time installing Security Onion 2.4, then we highly recommend starting with an IMPORT installation as shown at:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/first-time-users.html

Once you’re comfortable with your IMPORT installation, then you can move on to more advanced installations as shown at:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/architecture.html

Existing 2.4 Installations

If you have an existing Security Onion 2.4 installation, you can update to the latest version using soup:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/soup.html

Before updating your production deployment, we highly recommend testing the upgrade process on a test deployment that closely matches your production deployment if possible. This is especially important for releases that update components like Salt and Elastic.

2.3 EOL

As a reminder, Security Onion 2.3 reached End Of Life (EOL) on April 6, 2024:

https://blog.securityonion.net/2023/10/6-month-eol-notice-for-security-onion-23.html

Thanks

Lots of love went into this release!

Special thanks to all our folks working so hard to make this release happen!

• Josh Brower
• Jason Ertel
• Wes Lambert
• Corey Ogburn
• Josh Patterson
• Mike Reeves

Questions, Problems, and Feedback

If you have any questions or problems relating to Security Onion 2.4, please use the 2.4 category at our Discussions site:

https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions/securityonion/discussions/categories/2-4

Security Onion Pro

We recently celebrated 10 years in business by announcing Security Onion Pro:

https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/07/celebrating-10-years-of-security-onion.html

Security Onion Pro includes many enterprise features that folks have been asking for:

• Open ID Connect (OIDC) - this now supports Proof Key for Code Exchange (PKCE)
• Data at Rest Encryption
• FIPS for the OS
• DoD STIG for the OS
• External Notifications in SOC
• Time Tracking inside of Cases
• Guaranteed Message Delivery

You can read more about these enterprise features at:

https://securityonion.com/pro

Training

Need training? Start with our free Security Onion Essentials training and then take a look at some of our other official Security Onion training!

https://securityonion.net/training

Security Onion Solutions Hardware Appliances

We know Security Onion's hardware needs, and our appliances are the perfect match for the platform. Leave the hardware research, testing, and support to us, so you can focus on what's important for your organization. Not only will you have confidence that your Security Onion deployment is running on the best-suited hardware, you will also be supporting future development and maintenance of the Security Onion project!

https://securityonion.com/hardware

Cloud Installations

For new Security Onion 2 installations in the cloud, this new version will soon be available on the AWS, Azure, and GCP marketplaces!

AWS Marketplace and Documentation:

https://securityonion.net/aws/?ref=_ptnr_soc_blog_241007

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/cloud-amazon.html

Azure Marketplace and documentation:

https://securityonion.net/azure

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/cloud-azure.html

GCP Marketplace and documentation:

https://securityonion.net/google

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/cloud-google.html

Screenshot Tour

If you want the quickest and easiest way to try out Security Onion 2.4, just follow the screenshots below to install an Import node. This can be done in a minimal VM with only 4GB RAM! For more information, please see:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/first-time-users.html