Wazuh¶

Description¶

Wazuh is a free, open source and enterprise-ready security monitoring solution for threat detection, integrity monitoring, incident response and compliance.

Usage¶

Security Onion utilizes Wazuh as a Host Intrusion Detection System (HIDS) on each of the Security Onion nodes.

The Wazuh components include:

manager - runs inside of so-wazuh Docker container and performs overall management of agents

API - runs inside of so-wazuh Docker container and allows for remote management of agents, querying, etc.

agent - runs directly on each host and monitors logs/activity and reports to manager

The Wazuh API runs at TCP port 55000 locally, and currently uses the default credentials of user:foo and password:bar for authentication. Keep in mind, the API port is not exposed externally by default. Therefore, firewall rules need to be in place to reach the API from another location other than the Security Onion node on which the targeted Wazuh manager is running.

Since the manager runs inside a Docker container, many of the Wazuh binaries that you might want to run will need to be run inside the Docker container. For example, to run agent_upgrade:

sudo docker exec -it so-wazuh /var/ossec/bin/agent_upgrade

Configuration¶

The main configuration file for Wazuh is /opt/so/conf/wazuh/ossec.conf.

Email¶

If you want to configure Wazuh to send email, please see the Email Configuration section.

Syslog¶

If you want to send Wazuh logs to an external syslog collector, please see the Syslog Output section.

Active Response¶

Sometimes, Wazuh may recognize legitimate activity as potentially malicious and engage in Active Response to block a connection. This may result in unintended consequences such as blocking of trusted IPs. To prevent this from occurring, you can add your IP address to a safe list and change other settings in /opt/so/conf/wazuh/ossec.conf in the  section. so-allow does this for you automatically when you allow analyst connections.

Tuning Rules¶

You can add new rules and modify existing rules in /opt/so/rules/hids/local_rules.xml.

Adding Agents¶

The Wazuh agent is cross platform and you can download agents for Windows/Unix/Linux/FreeBSD from the Wazuh website:

https://documentation.wazuh.com/3.13/installation-guide/packages-list/index.html

Note

It is important to ensure that you download the agent that matches the version of your Wazuh server. For example, if your Wazuh server is version 3.13.1, then you will want to deploy Wazuh agent version 3.13.1.

Once you’ve installed the Wazuh agent on the host(s) to be monitored, then perform the steps defined here:

https://documentation.wazuh.com/3.13/user-manual/registering/command-line-registration.html

You may need to run so-allow to allow traffic from the IP address of your Wazuh agent(s).

Maximum Number of Agents¶

Security Onion is configured to support a maximum number of 14000 Wazuh agents reporting to a single Wazuh manager.

Automated Deployment¶

If you would like to automate the deployment of Wazuh agents, the Wazuh server includes ossec-authd. You can read more about ossec-authd at https://documentation.wazuh.com/3.13/user-manual/reference/daemons/ossec-authd.html.

When using ossec-authd, be sure to add a firewall exception for agents to access port 1515/tcp on the Wazuh manager node by running so-allow and choosing the r option.