Security Onion: September 2025

Security Onion 2.4.180 is now available and includes several new features, updated components, and many quality of life improvements! For Security Onion Pro customers, we've improved our hypervisor feature from our last release and also added a highly requested reporting feature!

Alert on Offline Agents

Security Onion can now alert on offline agents:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/elastic-fleet.html#monitoring-agents

Cancel Your Own Long Running SOC Query

If you run a query in Security Onion Console (Alerts, Dashboards, Hunt) that takes a long time, you now have the ability to cancel your own query by clicking the X on the spinner animation.

Enable Static Hostname Mapping without Reverse DNS Lookups

You can now enable static hostname mappings without having to enable reverse DNS lookups:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/soc-customization.html#local-lookups

Please note that if you had previously enabled reverse DNS lookups and want to continue using reverse DNS lookups, then you will need to re-enable it as it has moved to a different config location:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/soc-customization.html#reverse-dns

Updated Components

This release updates several components including:

The Elastic and Suricata updates resolve security issues so we highly recommend upgrading.

Security Onion Pro Feature: Manager Hypervisor

In the recent 2.4.170 release, we added a new hypervisor feature for Security Onion Pro customers. This release improves on that by allowing you to run the hypervisor on a manager. For more information about the Hypervisor feature, please see:

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

Security Onion Pro Feature: Reporting

Many customers have requested reporting and we are excited to include it in this release! This includes producing reports and data exports for analytical purposes. This allows you to present relevant data to your broader team:

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

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
Reports

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