Security Onion: 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