Alerts

Security Onion Console (SOC) gives you access to our Alerts interface. This interface gives you an overview of the alerts that Security Onion is generating and allows you to quickly drill down into details, pivot to Hunt or the PCAP interface, and escalate alerts to TheHive.

Starting in Security Onion 2.3.60, there is an Options drop-down menu that allows you to set options such as Acknowledged/Escalated, Automatic Refresh Interval, and Time Zone.

Toggles

The first option is for Acknowledged and Escalated:

• Enabling the Acknowledged toggle will only show alerts that have previously been acknowledged by an analyst.
• Enabling the Escalated toggle will only show alerts that have previously been escalated by an analyst to TheHive.

Automatic Refresh Interval

The second option is the Automatic Refresh Interval setting:

When enabled, the Alerts page will automatically refresh at the time interval you select.

Time Zone

Alerts will try to detect your local time zone via your browser. Starting in Security Onion 2.3.60, you can manually specify your time zone if necessary.

Query Bar

The query bar defaults to Group By Name, Module which groups the alerts by rule.name and event.module. If you want to send your current Alerts query to Hunt, you can click the crosshair icon to the right of the query bar.

Under the query bar, you’ll notice colored bubbles that represent the individual components of the query and the fields to group by. If you want to remove part of the query, you can click its corresponding bubble to remove it and run a new search.

You can click the dropdown box to select other queries which will group by other fields.

Time Picker

By default, Alerts searches the last 24 hours. If you want to search a different time frame, you can change it in the upper right corner of the screen.

Data Table

The remainder of the page is a data table that starts in the grouped view and can be switched to the detailed view. Both views have some functionality in common:

• Clicking the table headers allows you to sort ascending or descending.
• Clicking the bell icon acknowledges an alert. That alert can then be seen by selecting the Acknowledged toggle at the top of the page. In the Acknowledged view, clicking the bell icon removes the acknowledgement.
• Clicking the blue exclamation icon escalates the alert to TheHive and creates a case. The case can then be seen in TheHive interface. If you need to find that original escalated alert in the Alerts page, you can enable the Escalated toggle (which will automatically enable the Acknowledged toggle as well).
• Clicking a value in the table brings up a context menu of actions for that value. This allows you to refine your existing search, start a new search, or even pivot to external sites like Google and VirusTotal.
• You can adjust the Rows per page setting in the bottom right and use the left and right arrow icons to page through the table.

Grouped View

By default, alerts are grouped by whatever criteria is selected in the query bar. Clicking a field value and then selecting the Drilldown option allows you to drill down into that value which switches to the detailed view.

Starting in Security Onion 2.3.60, you can also click the value in the Count column to perform a quick drilldown. Note that this quick drilldown feature is only enabled for certain queries.

Detailed View

If you click a value in the grouped view and then select the Drilldown option, the display will switch to the detailed view. This shows all search results and allows you to then drill into individual search results as necessary. Clicking the table headers allows you to sort ascending or descending. Starting from the left side of each row, there is an arrow which will expand the result to show all of its fields. To the right of that arrow is the Timestamp field. Next, a few standard fields are shown: rule.name, event.severity_label, source.ip, source.port, destination.ip, and destination.port. Depending on what kind of data you’re looking at, there may be some additional data-specific fields as well.

When you click the arrow to expand a row in the Events table, it will show all of the individual fields from that event. Field names are shown on the left and field values on the right. When looking at the field names, there is an icon to the left that will add that field to the groupby section of your query. You can click on values on the right to bring up the context menu to refine your search or pivot to other pages.

Context Menu

Clicking a value in the page brings up a context menu that allows you to refine your existing search, start a new search, or even pivot to external sites like Google and VirusTotal.

Include

Clicking the Include option will add the selected value to your existing search to only show search results that include that value.

Exclude

Clicking the Exclude option will exclude the selected value from your existing search results.

Only

Clicking the Only option will start a new search for the selected value and retain any existing groupby terms.

Group By

Clicking the Group By option will update the existing query and aggregate the results based on the selected field.

Clipboard

The Clipboard sub-menu has several options that allow you to copy selected data to your clipboard in different ways.

Actions

The Actions sub-menu has several different options:

• Clicking the Hunt option will start a new search for the selected value and will aggregate the results by event.module and event.dataset to give you a good overview of what types of data are available for that indicator.
• Clicking the Correlate option will find related logs based on Community ID, uid, fuid, etc.
• Clicking the PCAP option will pivot to the PCAP interface to retrieve full packet capture for the selected stream.
• Clicking the Google option will search Google for the selected value.
• Clicking the VirusTotal option will search VirusTotal for the selected value.

If you’d like to add your own custom actions, you can copy /opt/so/saltstack/default/salt/soc/files/soc/menu.actions.json to /opt/so/saltstack/local/salt/soc/files/soc/menu.actions.json and then add new entries. (Previous to Security Onion 2.3.60, this would be done in alerts.actions.json.)

For example, suppose you want to add AbuseIPDB with URL https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/{value}. First, copy /opt/so/saltstack/default/salt/soc/files/soc/menu.actions.json to /opt/so/saltstack/local/salt/soc/files/soc/menu.actions.json:

sudo cp -n /opt/so/saltstack/default/salt/soc/files/soc/menu.actions.json /opt/so/saltstack/local/salt/soc/files/soc/menu.actions.json

Next, edit /opt/so/saltstack/local/salt/soc/files/soc/menu.actions.json using your favorite text editor and insert the following as the next to last line of the file:

,{ "name": "AbuseIPDB", "description": "Search for this value at AbuseIPDB", "icon": "fa-external-link-alt", "target": "_blank","links": [ "https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/{value}" ]}

Finally, restart SOC to make the changes take effect:

sudo so-soc-restart

You can also create background actions that don’t necessarily result in the user being taken to a new page or tab. For example, if you want to have a new action submit a case to JIRA, you would define it as a background POST action. When it completes the POST, it will show an auto-fading message in SOC telling you that the action completed. Alternatively, instead of the auto-fading message you can have it pop a new tab (or redirect SOC tab) to JIRA. Because of CORS restrictions, SOC can’t expect to have visibility into the result of the background POST so there is no attempt to parse the response of any background action, other than the status code/text from the request’s response.

Here is an example of a background action that submits a javascript fetch to a remote resource and then optionally shows the user a second URL:

{
  "name": "My Background Action",
  "description": "Something wonderful!",
  "icon": "fa-star",
  "target": "_blank",
  "links": [
    "http://somewhere.invalid/?somefield={:client.ip|base64}"
  ],
  "background": true,
  "method": "POST",
  "options": {
    "mode": "no-cors",
    "headers": {
      "header1": "header1value",
      "header2:" "header2value"
    }
  },
  "body": "something={value|base64}",
  "backgroundSuccessLink": "https://securityonion.net?code={responseCode}&text={responseStatus}",
  "backgroundFailureLink": "https://google.com?q={error}"
},

The options object is the same options object that will be passed into the Javascript fetch() method. You can read more about that at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API/Using_Fetch.