That is an unfortunate fact, which shows that most managements are approving budgets on SIEM only because they have to, which is not an act of being security proactive. Luckily, theres a way to show your management the value of SIEM, without spending a penny, by deploying Alien. Vaults OSSIM Open Source SIEM. Not having to pay for OSSIM doesnt necessarily mean theres no cost. Someone once said that Open Source tools are free but your time is not free. So, although theres no price tag for OSSIM, theres definitely a cost for planning, deploying, and supporting the technology. Nevertheless, OSSIM can be a great initiative for companies who have a need for SIEM but havent been able receive funding for it or for companies who are considering Alien. Vaults Professional Unified Security Management but would like to try the basic functionalities before buying it. Having the right expectations and clear requirements can be a large part of SIEM projects success. Although it is true that most things are automated once the deployment phase is over, there still needs to be human level support to monitor the system. So it is vital to have an owner for the SIEM, and the owner would typically be Information Security team. Alien. Vault Introduction Alien. Vaults OSSIM has been in the SIEM market since 2. SIEM platform available today. According to Alien. Vaults website, OSSIM deployments are about 1. SIEM world. The professional edition is called Unified Security Management Platform based on OSSIM platform. Although OSSIM is a well known security management product, its creator Alien. Vault is still fairly new in the security market and is experiencing many changes in terms of funding, organizational structuring, and product development. The company recently relocated its headquarters from Europe to North America and reorganized its management team by stealing 7 HP security executives. Also, at the beginning of this year, Alien. Vault raised 8 million series B financing round, which makes the total funding to 1. Reference 2. As a result of those major changes, Alien. Vault is rapidly improving the product by introducing Alien. Vault Open Threat Exchange AV OTX for collaborative defense, which further reduces costs and improves visibility for 1. OSSIM deployments and Alien. Vault customers around the globe Reference 6. In April 2. 01. 2 edition, SC Magazine reviewed various SIEM technologies in their Product Section, and they gave four and a half stars out of five for Alien. Vaults professional edition SIEM. According to SC Magazines review, Alien. Vaults strength is that it is highly capable SIEM with a nice feature set, but the weakness is the overall high cost of ownership with price of 3. The Professional edition, Unified Security Management Platform, comes with more advanced features in performance, administration, reporting, and technical support than OSSIM Reference 3. One key feature OSSIM doesnt have but the professional edition has is Logger, which is an additional database for forensic purpose. Logger allows you to store the large amount logs with digital signature and time stamp for long term using mostly NASSAN storage system. Another advantage of choosing professional edition is that it offers greater coverage against attack with more than 6. In OSSIM, one needs to rely on community and hisher own ability to customize for any technical support, just like with any other open source software. OSSIM can be used by small organizations, but its most effective when used by large organizations where there are multiple network devices such as firewall, IDSIPS and Anti Virus and web servers etc. OSSIM is already integrated with other open source security tools including, but not limited to, Snort, Ntop, Open. VAS, P0f, Pads, Arpwatch, OSSEC, Osiris, Nagios, OCS, and Kismet. Having well known open source tools as part of the platform makes it easier for security professionals to work with it. Technical Description. Here is what the OSSIMs basic operations are External applications and devices generate events External Data SourcesApplications shipped with Alien. Vault generate events Alien. Install Cydia Apps Without Respring Reboot on this page. Vault SensorsEvents are collected and normalized before being sent to a central Server Alien. Vault SensorsThe Alien. Vault Server does the Risk Assessment, correlation and storage of the events in an SQL Database SIEMThe Alien. Vault Server stores the events Digitally signed in a Massive Storage system, usually NAS or SAN Logger professional edition only A web interface allows and provides a reporting system, metrics, reports, Dashboards, ticketing system, a vulnerability, Management system and real time information of the network Web interface Reference 4. Agents Collection methods. There are multiple ways to collect logs from hosts using agents like Ossec and Snare. Alternatives to installing agents for Linux systems are simply configuring rsyslog or setting up snmptrapd. The best way to forward logs from a Windows system is to use Snare. Plugins. Much of the deployment work comes when connecting desired data sources to the OSSIM server. OSSIM needs a plug in to connect any data source to the server. Plug in is an XML based configuration file. According to Alien. Vaults website, OSSIM comes with 2. Reference 6. Here are some of the useful plug ins Anit virus Mcafee, Symantec, Sophos, AvastApache. IISCheck. Point Fw. Cisco. Citrix. Exchange. Syslog. Wmi. Ossec. Snare. Snort. Kismet. Open. VASOsiris. Nessus. Nagios. Ntop. Nmap. Based on my experience, although OSSIM has a plug in for almost anything, it doesnt mean that every plug in you enable will work. This is because some of the plug ins were written a long time ago and the associated products and their log formats have been updated since then. So, you might need to modify the configuration file, which requires advanced knowledge of regular expression. Also its possible and actually quite simple to create a new plug in. The main steps for writing a new plug in are Add plugin entry into config. Create plugin file. Create regexp. Create pluginsid sql file. Populate database Reference 6Correlation. Correlation is one of the core features that defines OSSIM as an intelligent security event management platform and distinguishes it from IDS IPS. It helps to reduce false positives by transforming multiple input events and alarms to a more reliable output so that there is a manageable amount of events to pay attention to. Correlation feature consist of Cross Correlation and Logical Correlation Correlation Directive. Cross Correlation works only with events that have defined destination IPs because it has to check the destination host to determine whether it has any vulnerabilities not in the database and changes the reliability value of the event accordingly. Veritas Backup Exec Administrators Guide. Veritas Backup Exec is a high performance data management solution for Windows servers networks. With its clientserver design, Backup Exec provides fast, reliable backup and restore capabilities for servers, applications, and workstations across the network. Backup Exec is available in several configurations that can accommodate networks of all sizes. In addition, Backup Execs family of agents and features offers solutions for scaling your Backup Exec environment and extending platform and feature support.
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