Security Onion: Security Onion 2.4.170 now available including JA4, more SOC dashboards, and updated components!

Security Onion 2.4.170 is now available and includes JA4, more SOC dashboards, and updated components including Elastic 8.18.4, Suricata 7.0.11, and Zeek 7.0.9! Security Onion Pro customers will also have access to our new hypervisor feature!

JA4

This release includes JA4 support:

SOC Dashboards

This release includes several new SOC dashboards!

CEF dashboard:

iptables dashboard:

UniFi Firewall Overview dashboard:

UniFi Firewall Blocks dashboard:

UniFi Firewall Allows dashboard:

UniFi System dashboard:

Elastic 8.18.4

This release includes Elastic 8.18.4 which brings an upgrade for Elastic Defend. This includes a new DNS event collector for macOS endpoints and on new installations we're able to enable this by default. For existing installs, you will need to manually enable this feature. After upgrading, we recommend you review the endpoints-initial policy or any other policy utilizing the Elastic Defend integration.

Security Onion Pro Hypervisor Feature

Security Onion Pro users can create a hypervisor node that can run virtualized instances of Security Onion. If you have eligible machines with extra horsepower, you can use this feature to spin up additional Security Onion virtual machines (VMs) to take advantage of that extra power. This supports most major Security Onion node types and is especially helpful if you want to optimize your hardware's potential and expand your Elastic performance and retention. Contact your account manager to see if your hardware is supported.

Install a new node, select the DISTRIBUTED deployment option, choose Existing Deployment, and then select the Hypervisor option:

Once the new hypervisor node has been accepted into the grid, go to SOC Configuration, click the Options menu, enable advanced settings, and then navigate to hypervisor settings. It should look like this:

Once the base domain has been configured on the hypervisor (allowing VMs to be created), it should look like this:

To create a new VM, click the plus sign. You should see a form like this:

Fill out the form and then click the green check to save and create the VM:

Once the VM is created and the first highstate is initiated, it should look like this:

Release Notes

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
Corey Ogburn
Josh Patterson
Mike Reeves
Jorge Reyes
Matthew Wright

Questions, Problems, and Feedback

If you have any questions or problems, please create a new Discussion at:

https://securityonion.net/discuss

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:

Active Query Management
External API
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
Manager of Managers
MCP Server
Security Onion App for Splunk
Hypervisor

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_250812

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