Posts by Rapid7

4 min Automation and Orchestration

Information Security Risk Management Cycle - Overview

Synopsis Information security risk management [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/information-security-risk-management/] is a wide topic, with many notions, processes, and technologies that are often confused with each other. In this series of articles, I explain notions and describe processes related to risk management. I also review NIST and ISO standards related to information security risk management. In theprevious article [/2017/06/24/information-security-risk-management-introduction/],

3 min Automation and Orchestration

How to Install and Configure AIDE on Ubuntu Linux

Synopsys Aide also known as Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment is an open source host based file and directory integrity checker. It is a replacement for the well-known Tripwire integrity checker that can be used to monitor filesystem for unauthorized change. It is very usefull when someone placing a backdoor on your web site and make changes that may take your system down completely. Aide creates a database from your filesystem and stores various file attributes like permissions, inode nu

7 min Automation and Orchestration

How to Install and Configure OSSEC on Ubuntu Linux.

Synopsys OSSEC is an open source host-based intrusion detection system that can be used to keep track of servers activity. It supports most operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, Solaris and much more. It is used to monitor one server or multiple servers in server/agent mode and give you a real-time view into what’s happening on your server. OSSEC has a cross-platform architecture that enables you to monitor multiple systems from centralized location. In this tutorial, we w

6 min Komand

10 Steps Towards the Path of Better Security for Your Business

Information security is hard. So hard, in fact, that many choose to ignore it as an intractable problem, and choose to ignore it wherever possible. They use the same password everywhere, carry sensitive data around on unencrypted laptops which they then leave on public transportation, run old applications on old operating systems, and a plethora of other such security issues. In an alarmingly-large number of data breaches, attackers do not resort to zero-day attacks or secret blackhat hacker te

2 min Automation and Orchestration

Setting Up and Managing a Bug Bounty Program

Synopsis Bug bounties have become mainstream and rightfully so. They offer a method to access and harness the intelligence of varied set of expert hackers and security researchers without having to incur the cost of hiring an army of security professionals. The main advantage though is that one can keep a step ahead of the malicious hackers. This article talks about how to setup a bug bounty program and some of the pitfalls to watch out for. When to do a Bug Bounty ? One obvious question that w

5 min Automation and Orchestration

How to Install and Use PSAD IDS on Ubuntu Linux

Synopsys PSAD also known as Port Scan Attack Detector is a collection of lightweight system daemons that run on Linux system and analyze iptables log messages to detect port scans and other suspicious traffic.PSAD is used to change an Intrusion Detection System into an Intrusion Prevention System. PSAD uses Snort rules for the detection of intrusion events. It is specially designed to work with Linux iptables/firewalld to detect suspicious traffic such as, port scans, backdoors and botnet comman

4 min Automation and Orchestration

How to Install and Configure Bro on Ubuntu Linux

Synopsis Bro is a free open source Unix based network analysis framework started by Vern Paxson. Bro provides a comprehensive platform for collecting network measurements, conducting forensic investigations and traffic baselining. Bro comes with powerful analysis engine which makes it powerful intrusion detection system and network analysis framework. Bro comes with a powerful set of features, some of them are listed below: * Runs on commodity hardware and supports Linux, FreeBSD and MacOS.

4 min Automation and Orchestration

Information Security Risk Management - Introduction

Synopsis Information security risk management [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/information-security-risk-management/] is a wide topic, with many notions, processes, and technologies that are often confused with each other. Very often technical solutions (cybersecurity products) are presented as “risk management” solutions without process-related context. Modern cybersecurity risk management [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/what-is-cybersecurity-risk-management/] is not possible without

4 min Automation and Orchestration

Information Security Risk Management - Tiered Approach of NIST SP 800-39

Synopsis Information security risk management [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/information-security-risk-management/] is a wide topic, with many notions, processes, and technologies that are often confused with each other. In this series of articles, I explain notions and describe processes related to risk management. I also review NIST and ISO standards related to information security risk management. In theprevious article [/2017/07/09/information-security-risk-management-cycle-overview/

4 min Automation and Orchestration

Information Security Risk Management Cycle - Context Establishment Phase

Synopsis Information security risk management [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/information-security-risk-management/] is a wide topic, with many notions, processes, and technologies that are often confused with each other. In this series of articles, I explain notions and describe processes related to risk management. I also review NIST and ISO standards related to information security risk management. In the previous article, I reviewed the tiered risk management approach described in NIS

5 min Automation and Orchestration

The Effective Components of Security Orchestration

It’s one thing to have a plan for security orchestration [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/security-orchestration/], but it’s another to get it up and running and use it to its full potential. At this point, most security professionals know that security orchestration and automation [https://www.rapid7.com/solutions/security-orchestration-and-automation/] are a “need to have,” not a “nice to have,” but to fully leverage security orchestration, there are a few considerations that will help yo

6 min InsightOps

What is BDD Testing: Practical Examples of Behavior Driven Development Testing

The Need for Behavior Driven Development (BDD) Testing Tools It should come as no surprise to learn that testing is at the heart of our engineers' daily activities. Testing is intrinsic to our development process, both in practical terms and in our thinking. Our engineers work with complex systems that are made up of complex components. Individual components may have many external dependencies. When testing, the scope of what is to be tested is important – it can be system wide, focused on a p

5 min InsightOps

5 Ways to Use Log Data to Analyze System Performance

Analyzing System Performance Using Log Data Recently we examined some of the most common behaviors that our community of 25,000 users looked for in their logs, with a particular focus on web server logs. In fact, our research identified the top 15 web server tags and alerts created by our customers—you can read more about these in our https://logentries.com/doc/community-insights/ section—and you can also easily create tags or alerts based on the patterns to identify these behaviors in your sys

3 min Automation and Orchestration

Will Investing in Security Orchestration Make Your SIEM Obsolete?

As more companies continue to adopt security orchestration, many are now wondering if their security information and event management (SIEM) [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/siem/] systems will soon become obsolete. Security teams use SIEMs to manage and correlate alerts from detection tools with other data and logs. While SIEMS help to corral alerts and log data, they often don’t do much in the way of reducing alerts or investigatory tasks after an alert comes in. Security teams have many

4 min DevOps

DevOps: Vagrant with AWS EC2 & Digital Ocean

The Benefits of Vagrant Plugins Following on from my recent DevOps blog posts, The DevOps Tools We Use & How We Use Them [https://blog.logentries.com/2014/02/the-devops-tools-we-use-how-we-use-them/] and Vagrant with Chef-Server [https://blog.logentries.com/2014/03/devops-vagrant-with-chef-server/], we will take another step forward and look into provisioning our servers in the cloud. There are many cloud providers out there, most who provide some sort of APIs. Dealing with the different APIs