Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Security Onion Enterprise Features and Licensing

From Doug Burks, Founder and CEO of Security Onion Solutions:

I've been privileged to watch Security Onion grow as a security monitoring platform over the years. From its roots as a small software project in 2008, Security Onion has matured into a premier free solution for enterprise security monitoring, threat hunting, and log management for a global user base of all sizes and across all industry verticals. As our user and customer bases have grown, so too have the requests for enterprise features and licensing. The team at Security Onion Solutions continues to work with the community to shift advantage to defenders while growing an enterprise platform. 


Enterprise customers are asking for enterprise features and licensing and this requires significant time and effort to build the features and license key functionality. To prevent organizations from removing the license key functionality from the source code, we must change the license on the source code. We considered several options for changing the license, but introducing a new license would require more time and effort for our customers and community to understand the new license. We ultimately decided on Elastic License version 2 (ELv2) for the following reasons:


Most of our users were not affected by the change to ELv2 in 2021. We expect most users will be similarly unaffected by moving Security Onion components to this license. 


You can read the ELv2 license in its entirety at:

https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license


We expect the license to go into effect upon release of Security Onion 2.4, anticipated in 2023.

Q&A


What is changing?

Security Onion components are changing license from GPL to Elastic License v2 (ELv2). This includes our active repos at https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions.


When is this change happening?

We expect this change to go into effect upon release of Security Onion 2.4, anticipated in 2023.


What changes are coming in Security Onion 2.4? The development focus for 2.4 is community features for the platform and the transition to ELv2 license.


Will there be paid features for Security Onion 2.4?

For the initial release of Security Onion 2.4.0, there are no planned paid features. We anticipate that later releases will add some paid features designed for enterprise customers.


I am a free community user. Can I use Security Onion 2.4 for free?

As long as you are adhering to the license, any free features in Security Onion 2.3 that carry over to Security Onion 2.4 will remain free.


I am a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) running Security Onion for my customers. How does this license change impact me? MSSP users who offer their services without customers accessing substantial portions of Security Onion functionality are not affected by this change. If you are a current Security Onion Solutions customer, please contact your account manager with questions.


What is ELv2?

ELv2 is the Elastic License version 2. You can read more about that at:

https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license


Is Security Onion owned by Elastic?

No, Security Onion is not owned by Elastic. Security Onion is simply adopting the ELv2 license. This is analogous to projects that use the Apache license but aren’t owned by the Apache Software Foundation.


Why did Security Onion choose the ELv2 license for its software?

Enterprise customers are asking for enterprise features and licensing and this requires significant time and effort to build the features and license key functionality. To prevent organizations from removing the license key functionality from the source code, we must change the license on the source code. We considered several options for changing the license, but introducing a new license would require more time and effort for our customers as many enterprise organizations must have software licenses reviewed by their legal departments. We ultimately decided on Elastic License version 2 (ELv2) for the following reasons:


Has ELv2 been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI)?

No, ELv2 has not been approved by OSI as an open source license.


Can I continue to use 2.3 and not upgrade to 2.4? When we release Security Onion 2.4, we will announce an End Of Life (EOL) date for Security Onion 2.3.x. Security Onion 2.3.x will continue to receive security patches and priority bug fixes until it reaches EOL.


I am a current (paid) Security Onion Solutions customer and I have questions about this change. To whom should I reach out?

Please feel free to reach out to your account manager.


I am a community user of Security Onion and I have questions about this change. How may I ask those questions?

Please open a new discussion at https://securityonion.net/discuss.



UPDATE 2022/12/20 - changed 2.4 ETA to 2023

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Quick Malware Analysis: IcedID / Bokbot with Cobalt Strike pcap from 2022-08-08

Thanks to Brad Duncan for sharing this pcap!
https://www.malware-traffic-analysis.net/2022/08/08/index.html

We did a quick analysis of this pcap on the latest version of Security Onion via so-import-pcap:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/so-import-pcap.html

The screenshots below show some of the interesting Suricata alerts, Zeek logs, and session transcripts.

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
https://securityonion.net/docs

More Samples

Find all of our Quick Malware posts at:
https://blog.securityonion.net/search/label/quick%20malware%20analysis

Screenshots

Click the first image to start the screenshot tour:















Security Onion 2.3.160 now available including Zeek 4.0.8 and much more!

Security Onion 2.3.160 is now available! It updates Zeek and resolves a few issues:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/release-notes.html#changes

Documentation

You can find our documentation here:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/

Documentation is always a work in progress and some documentation may be missing or incorrect. Please let us know if you notice any issues.

New Installations

If you want to perform a new installation, please review the documentation and then you can find instructions here:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/download.html

Existing 2.3 Installations

WARNING! If you have an existing Security Onion 2.3 installation that hasn't yet been updated to version 2.3.140 or higher, then you should be aware that the Elastic components will undergo a major version upgrade to version 8. Please review and follow the steps at the link below. Failure to do so could result in loss of access to all data stored inside of Elastic and a non-functioning Security Onion installation.

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/soup.html#elastic-8

Please be aware that custom settings in Kibana may be overwritten during upgrade. We recommend that you test the upgrade process on a test deployment before deploying to production. If you have a distributed deployment, then we recommend monitoring SOC Grid while your update is running to verify that all nodes update properly. If there are issues, you can review logs, services, and containers for any additional clues. If you need help, please see our support information below.

If you have custom Elasticsearch templates, please see:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/elasticsearch.html#custom-templates

For more information about the update process, please see:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/soup.html

AWS Marketplace

For new Security Onion 2 installations on AWS, Security Onion 2.3.160 will soon be available on AWS Marketplace via the official Security Onion 2 AMI:
https://securityonion.net/aws/?ref=_ptnr_soc_blog_220830

AMI Documentation:
https://securityonion.net/docs/cloud-ami

Existing Security Onion 2 AMI users should use the "soup" command to upgrade:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/soup.html

Azure Marketplace

For new Security Onion 2 installations on Azure, Security Onion 2.3.160 will soon be available on the Azure Marketplace!

https://securityonion.net/azure

Azure Documentation:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/cloud-azure.html

Existing Security Onion 2 users on Azure should use the "soup" command to upgrade:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/soup.html

Security Onion 16.04 EOL

As a reminder, Security Onion 16.04 has reached End Of Life (EOL):
https://blog.securityonion.net/2021/04/security-onion-1604-has-reached-end-of.html

If you're still running Security Onion 16.04, please see the following for upgrade options:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/appendix.html

Questions or Problems

If you have questions or problems, please see our community support forum guidelines:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/community-support.html

You can then find the community support forum at:
https://securityonion.net/discuss

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
  • Josh Patterson
  • Mike Reeves

Conference

Registration is now open for Augusta Cyber Week in Augusta GA from September 26, 2022 through October 1, 2022! This includes 4-day Security Onion training, Security Onion Conference, and BSidesAugusta. These are separate events, but if you sign up for the 4-day training class, you get a FREE non-transferable ticket to both Security Onion Conference and BSidesAugusta!

4-day Security Onion training:
https://bsidesaugusta.org/training/#SecurityOnion

Security Onion Conference 2022:
https://socaugusta2022.eventbrite.com/

BSidesAugusta:
https://bsidesaugusta.org/

Hope to see you there!

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

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

Screenshot Tour

If you want the quickest and easiest way to try out Security Onion 2, just follow the screenshots below to install an Import node and then optionally enable the Analyst Workstation. This can be done in a minimal VM with only 4GB RAM! For more information, please see:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.3/first-time-users.html