SkyRadar Blog

The cyber security industry is filled with many great options for intrusion detection and prevention solutions for your perimeter. However, there are only a small number of tried-and-true platforms that have become ubiquitous and used as a foundation for other newer platforms. One of the most prominent open-source solutions is Snort. With Snort installed in the environment at the perimeter, a security team can not only forensically see what took place on the network, but also see how it happened. For the purpose of this article, we are going to focus on Snort for intrusion detection analysis. We will be walking through common scenarios that the incident response team will have to investigate from time to time.

For about two decades, security leaders were told over and over by many vendors that the key to good security is setting up proper VPNs (virtual private networks) which promised encryption and protection against malicious actors. With the rise of remote work, global work forces, contractors and trusted 3rd parties having access to the company network, having the right solution in place, coupled with proper logging and monitoring, can help you detect any potential issues before they become a major incident.

The keys to successful incident response equate to having the proper people, processes, and tools in place to act decisively when an incident occurs, which is a recurring theme in our incident response articles. Without proper logging occurring ahead of time, which is a large part of the picture for security operations and incident response, teams, it will make it difficult to prove how long a threat actor was in an environment, and depending on the lack of logs, could be very difficult to provide analysis on activities taken by the threat actors or insider threats depending on the case scenario.

This article sheds light on Firewall Logs in incident investigations. We explore key behaviors and patterns for effective threat detection

Background

Historically, security teams would advocate for their IT teams and management to approve the implementation of multi-factor authentication in order to reduce the impact of threats such as brute force attacks against passwords, mitigate fall out from phishing emails and other social engineering related attacks. For context, there are multiple methods of implementing two factor authentication, which includes but is not limited to, SMS based, voice and app based. Once an implementation is in place, this will provide security and incident response teams additional protection and more importantly, additional data points to investigate security alerts.

CASB solutions can help your business in addressing risk in cloud-based services, consistently enforce security policies and comply with regulations, even when these services reside beyond your perimeter and out of your direct control. The value stems from the ability to identify high-risk applications, users, and other key risk factors across cloud platforms - a potential blind spot for many businesses.

Endpoint detection and response (EDR) provides continuous monitoring and analysis of endpoints, aiding incident response teams in efficiently managing threats and reducing overall response times in cybersecurity operations.

This article explores cyber investigations through leveraging the Security Stack. It sheds light on the role of password reset logs in swift breach detection and mitigation.

As part of our series on how incident response teams leverage different parts of the security stack for investigations, we now are going to look at how anti-virus logs are used and can be used.