Re: Open source SIEM

["Nevin, Dave" <Dave.Nevin () OREGONSTATE EDU>]

Just my humble opinion, but I think the use of SIEMs—or at least log aggregation and correlation—is prevalent amongst 
higher education institutions; the price of commercial tools are turning people toward open source solutions. To that 
end, we’ve used Splunk, and are looking toward the Elastic Stack.

As far as the SOC discussion, I’d highly suggest taking a look at the SOC Case Study: 
https://library.educause.edu/resources/2019/6/security-operations-center-soc-case-study

Dave


Dave Nevin | Director
Oregon Research & Teaching Security Operations Center
Oregon State University | A008 Kerr Admin Bldg
Corvallis, OR 97331 | Phone: 541-713-3549


From: The EDUCAUSE Security Community Group Listserv <SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU> on behalf of "Powell, Andy" 
<ap16 () WILLIAMS EDU>
Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Security Community Group Listserv <SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU>
Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2020 at 9:44 AM
To: "SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU" <SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU>
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Open source SIEM

Hi all, I've been following along with great interest on this topic, having come from corp environments where I've 
deployed, tuned, used (and enjoyed!) a variety of commercial SIEMs (QRadar, NetWitness, Exabeam DL/AA).

Dave, I'm somewhat surprised by your suggestion...MSSPs are an increasingly attractive 
target<https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/ransomware-at-it-services-provider-synoptek/> for attackers, as the bad guys 
know they represent the most bang for their bitcoin. Unless you are speaking about Higher Ed MSSPs only (are there such 
things?), why would you want to throw your investigative abilities into the same pool as those corporate targets that a 
MSSP also serves?

I think this introduces more risk, setting aside the conversation of prompt alerting, secure log transport, ad-hoc 
investigations (you don't want to pay for), etc. The idea that logging and monitoring is sacrosanct (but still over 
UDP? Hmm..) means it is too important to ship off to an MSSP, imho.

Back to the topic at hand, we're looking at ELK stack, and thanks to this thread I'm researching MozDef too. Secure 
Onion is known to me and is currently my fall back plan. This will all play out over the next 12 months, ideally.

However, Dave infers a brilliant point...define your business requirements...write them down, and as you evaluate any 
solution, you'll have that to refer back to, ensuring it's not the tool you choose but the capability it provides. Best 
of luck!

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 12:17 PM David Eilken <david.eilken () domail maricopa edu<mailto:david.eilken () domail 
maricopa edu>> wrote:
I'll chime in on open-source tools for detection. I've been involved with the deployment/ use of the Elastic stack. 
Obviously many IS practitioners across industries use it, and Elastic has begun to tailor to IS specifically with 
endpoint agents, etc. You could build an entire career around it. The OpenSOC (https://opensoc.io/#portfolio) has a 
good list of tools they use with the Elasticsearch at the center.

I'm somewhat surprised to see so many that have built or are considering building your own SIEM solution or even 
purchasing a SIEM/ Logging tool. May I ask what is your brief business case versus using an MSSP to do it all for you? 
-Is it just cost?

If I had to guess, most in education don't have a SIEM or SOC in-house, but maybe that is changing?

Thanks for expanding on this conversation,
Dave
[Maricopa Community College District Office logo]
DAVID EILKEN MA, MBA, CISSP-ISSMP
MARICOPA COMMUNITY COLLEGES
Information Security Officer | ITS
2411 West 14th Street, Tempe, AZ 85281
david.eilken () domail maricopa edu<mailto:david.eilken () domail maricopa edu>
security.maricopa.edu<http://security.maricopa.edu>
O: 480-784-0637
LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/eilken> | Twitter <https://twitter.com/daveeilken>


On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 2:12 PM Kimmitt, Jonathan <jonathan-kimmitt () utulsa edu<mailto:jonathan-kimmitt () utulsa 
edu>> wrote:
We are in the middle of this process as well….  The one piece I would add to what the others have said, is that to make 
a SIEM effective, you have to be able to manage and search your logs well….  Our old Bro & Elk Stack ran about 8 
billion events a week, and was generally useless.  I don’t want to make that mistake in time/resources to deploy with 
no value on the other side…..

So, we have spent the time in collecting and filtering “out the noise” on the log side for the last year or so with a 
Syslog/event log aggregator….  Once we are getting the logs we want, AND can do basic manual analysis to answer the 
questions we have, AND understand how much traffic we truly have, we will look into what SIEM solution best fits….

Additionally, there are a lot of SIEM tools built into other tools (offic365,  MS ATP, Palo, etc)… so we want to be 
able to utilize those to the best of our ability, and send the data from them to our eventual SIEM solution…..

I also sent one of my Sec Analysts to the SANS 555 – SIEM with Tactical Analysis course, to build good fundamentals for 
the next step of our SEIM process…..  They used Elastic heavily in the class…..

SANS is expensive, the time doing the aggregation was painful…. But I really want the SEIM deployment to be successful 
and provide good output and alerting…

My general rule is a SIEM doesn’t solve any problems alone, it allows you to scale up your successful manual processes 
effectively.  The hard part is having successful manual processes… ☺

-Jonathan



From: The EDUCAUSE Security Community Group Listserv <SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU<mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV 
EDUCAUSE EDU>> On Behalf Of Zepu Chen
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2020 12:50 PM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU<mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU>
Subject: [SECURITY] Open source SIEM

Good Afternoon,

We are researching the possibility to implement an open-source SIEM solution at our University. The project we are 
currently reviewing is MozDef from Mozilla. Does anyone currently have MozDef or other open-source SIEM implemented in 
your environment? How are the implementation and operations experience so far?
We are interested in seeing what other schools are doing. We would greatly appreciate it if you would be kind enough to 
share any pitfalls, constraints and roadblocks as well as implementation recommendations.


Thanks,

[Denison 
University]<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdenison.edu%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cjonathan-kimmitt%40UTULSA.EDU%7Cf7a9f275c25643d7820408d7af232dd9%7Cd4ff013c62b74167924f5bd93e8202d3%7C0%7C1%7C637170437941526649&sdata=pwS2tk9CtK17KaKhAAUI4Hlj7Ix68XsqXxu6euOyFCE%3D&reserved=0>

Zepu Chen
Systems & Security Administrator
Information Technology Services

Office: 740-587-5307<tel:1-740-587-5307>
zepu.chen () denison edu<mailto:zepu.chen () denison edu>

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Information Security Director
Williams College
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