About

Security Onion

Security Onion is a free and open platform for threat hunting, enterprise security monitoring, and log management. It includes our own tools for Alerts, Dashboards, Hunt, PCAP, and Cases as well as other tools such as Playbook, FleetDM, osquery, CyberChef, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Suricata, Zeek, and Wazuh. 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 an army of distributed sensors for your enterprise in minutes!

Note

Security Onion started in 2008 and was originally based on the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Throughout the years, the Security Onion version tracked the version of Ubuntu it was based on. For example, the last major version of Security Onion was based on Ubuntu 16.04 and so it was called Security Onion 16.04. Security Onion is now container based and thus no longer limited to just Ubuntu. To signify this change, Security Onion now has its own versioning scheme and this new platform is Security Onion 2.

Security Onion Solutions, LLC

Doug Burks started Security Onion as a free and open project in 2008 and then founded Security Onion Solutions, LLC in 2014.

Important

Security Onion Solutions, LLC is the only official provider of hardware appliances, training, and professional services for Security Onion.

For more information about these products and services, please see our company site at https://securityonionsolutions.com.

Documentation

Warning

Documentation is always a work in progress and some documentation may be missing or incorrect. Please let us know if you notice any issues.

License

This documentation is licensed under CC BY 4.0. You can read more about this license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Formats

This documentation is published online at https://securityonion.net/docs. If you are viewing an offline version of this documentation but have Internet access, you might want to switch to the online version at https://securityonion.net/docs to see the latest version.

This documentation is also available in PDF format at https://readthedocs.org/projects/securityonion/downloads/pdf/2.3/.

Many folks have asked for a printed version of our documentation. Whether you work on airgapped networks or simply want a portable reference that doesn’t require an Internet connection or batteries, this is what you’ve been asking for. Thanks to Richard Bejtlich for writing the inspiring foreword! Proceeds go to the Rural Technology Fund! You can purchase your copy at https://securityonion.net/book.

Authors

Security Onion Solutions is the primary author and maintainer of this documentation. Some content has been contributed by members of our community. Thanks to all the folks who have contributed to this documentation over the years!

Contributing

We welcome your contributions to our documentation! We will review any suggestions and apply them if appropriate.

If you are accessing the online version of the documentation and notice that a particular page has incorrect information, you can submit corrections by clicking the Edit on GitHub button in the upper right corner of each page.

To submit a new page, you can submit a pull request (PR) to the 2.3 branch of the securityonion-docs repo at https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions/securityonion-docs.

Pages are written in RST format and you can find several RST guides on the Internet including https://thomas-cokelaer.info/tutorials/sphinx/rest_syntax.html.

Naming Convention

Our goal is to allow you to easily guess and type the URL of the documentation you want to go to. For example, if you want to read more about Suricata, you can type the following into your browser: https://securityonion.net/docs/suricata

To achieve this goal, new documentation pages should use the following naming convention:

  • all lowercase
  • .rst file extension
  • ideally, the name of the page should be one simple word (for example: suricata.rst)
  • try to avoid symbols if possible
  • if symbols are required, use hyphens (NOT underscores)