ElastAlert¶

From https://elastalert2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/elastalert.html#overview:

ElastAlert is a simple framework for alerting on anomalies, spikes, or other patterns of interest from data in Elasticsearch.

ElastAlert queries Elasticsearch and provides an alerting mechanism with multiple output types, such as Slack, Email, JIRA, OpsGenie, and many more.

Configuration¶

ElastAlert rules are stored in /opt/so/rules/elastalert/.

By default, ElastAlert rules are configured with an output type of debug, which simply outputs to a log file found in /opt/so/log/elastalert/.

ElastAlert logs to Elasticsearch indices. You can search those indices in Dashboards, Hunt, or Kibana. Security Onion Console (SOC) does not automatically search the elastalert indices by default so if you want to use Dashboards or Hunt to search ElastAlert logs, then you’ll need to adjust the es_index_patterns setting in your Salt pillar to include *:elastalert*:

es_index_patterns: '*:so-*,*:endgame-*,*:elastalert*'

Slack¶

To have ElastAlert send alerts to something like Slack, we can simply change the alert type and details for a rule like so:

alert:
- "slack":
    slack_webhook_url: "https://hooks.slack.com/services/YOUR_WEBHOOK_URI"

Email - Internal¶

To have ElastAlert send to email, we could do something like the following:

alert:
- "email"
email:
- "youremail@yourcompany.com"
smtp_host: "your_company_smtp_server"
smtp_port: 25
from_addr: "elastalert@yourcompany.com"

Email - External¶

If we need to use an external email provider like Gmail, we can add something like the following:

alert:
- "email"
email:
- "youremail@gmail.com"
smtp_host: "smtp.gmail.com"
smtp_port: 465
smtp_ssl: true
from_addr: "youremail@gmail.com"
smtp_auth_file: '/opt/elastalert/rules/smtp_auth_file.txt'

Then create a new file called /opt/so/rules/elastalert/smtp_auth_file.txt and add the following:

user: youremail@gmail.com
password: yourpassword

MISP¶

Please see the MISP section.

so-elastalert-create¶

so-elastalert-create is a tool created by Bryant Treacle that can be used to help ease the pain of ensuring correct syntax and creating Elastalert rules from scratch. It will walk you through various questions, and eventually output an Elastalert rule file that you can deploy in your environment to start alerting quickly and easily.

so-elastalert-test¶

so-elastalert-test is a wrapper script originally written by Bryant Treacle for ElastAlert’s elastalert-test-rule tool. The script allows you to test an ElastAlert rule and get results immediately. Simply run so-elastalert-test, and follow the prompt(s).

Note

so-elastalert-test does not yet include all options available to elastalert-test-rule.

Defaults¶

With Security Onion’s example rules, Elastalert is configured by default to only count the number of hits for a particular match, and will not return the actual log entry for which an alert was generated.

This is governed by the use of use_count_query: true in each rule file.

If you would like to view the data for the match, you can simply remark this line in the rule file(s). Keep in mind, this may impact performance negatively, so testing the change in a single file at a time may be the best approach.

Timeframe¶

Keep in mind, for queries that span greater than a minute back in time, you may want to add the following fields to your rule to ensure searching occurs as planned (for example, for 10 minutes):

buffer_time:
    minutes: 10

allow_buffer_time_overlap: true

https://elastalert2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ruletypes.html#buffer-time

https://github.com/Yelp/elastalert/issues/805

Diagnostic Logging¶

Elastalert diagnostic logs are in /opt/so/log/elastalert/. Depending on what you’re looking for, you may also need to look at the Docker logs for the container:

sudo docker logs so-elastalert