Security Onion: August 2024

Security Onion 2.4.100 is now available!

20240830 PLEASE NOTE! We've identified an issue in this release and are preparing a hotfix that should be released next week. The issue primarily affects deployments that have deployed remote agents to endpoints AND use Kibana. If you've already updated, you can use SOC Dashboards instead of Kibana dashboards. If you haven't updated yet, we recommend holding off until the hotfix is released to avoid any potential issues.

20240903 The hotfix has been released. Please see https://blog.securityonion.net/2024/09/security-onion-24100-hotfix-20240903.html.

Security Onion is a cybersecurity platform built by defenders for defenders. The focus of this release was updating several components including:

Elastic 8.14.3
ElastAlert 2.19.0
Docker Registry 2.8.3
Kratos 1.2.0
Salt 3006.9
InfluxDB 2.7.9
Kafka 3.8.0
Redis 7.2.5
Telegraf 1.31.3

Thanks to Pete Nelson for responsibly disclosing that some of our docker base images had some outdated layers with vulnerabilities. Within a week of disclosure, we had updated all base images to resolve the vulnerabilities. We've improved our internal processes to make sure that base images are updated on a more regular basis.

In addition to component updates and docker base image updates, another highlight of this release is that Security Onion Pro now has even more powerful and more granular notification capabilities! You can read more about this at https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/notifications.html.

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 this release due to the large number of component changes, especially Salt and Elastic.

Since this release includes an Elastic upgrade, after soup completes you'll want to go to Elastic Fleet and:

drill into each of your active agent policies, check the Agent Binary Download setting, and adjust if necessary for your deployment
check for any integrations that need to be upgraded
check for any agents that need to be upgraded (grid node agents should automatically upgrade so you should just need to look for any additional endpoint agents that you've deployed)

If you haven't already upgraded to 2.4.70 then, in preparation for the new Detections module, the following will be completed during soup:

Playbook Plays will be backed up to /nsm/backup/detections-migration/ and any active Elastalert rules will be backed up and removed.
Suricata tuning configurations will be backed to /nsm/backup/detections-migration/ and any thresholds will be migrated over to the new Detections module.

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)
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://securityonion.com/hardware

Cloud Installations

For new Security Onion 2 installations in the cloud, Security Onion 2.4 will soon be available on the AWS, Azure, and GCP marketplaces!

AWS Marketplace and Documentation:

https://securityonion.net/aws/?ref=_ptnr_soc_blog_240830

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