One of the many reasons I decided to deploy honeypots is to be able to observe attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This blog post will share a frequently used tactic that attackers use to keep access once they have compromised one of my distributed honeypots. You may benefit from the rest of this content … Read more
Splunk is a software technology that allows you to index, search, analyze, and visualize data at scale. I use it to ingest logs from my honeypots, homelab, and other projects. Initially, I had Splunk running in a local virtual machine where everything was fine except for the downtime, so I rapidly migrated it to an Amazon … Read more
Meterpreter is an advanced payload within the well-known Metasploit Framework (MSF). We will look specifically at the reverse_https payload and see how we can detect the listener in our environment. I always tell my junior analysts to make sure they can detect the low-hanging fruit. For instance, most tools such as Metasploit and Cobalt Strike … Read more
This blog post is the second installment of a series I want to use to cover lessons learned and interesting observations from my honeypots. These honeypots are geographically dispersed and have been running for a few years. Hopefully, this and future posts will add some value for someone. While looking over some of my honeypot … Read more
Whenever I want to analyze a relatively small packet capture (PCAP), I load it up in Wireshark and get the job done. However, this process does not scale and becomes a problem with large-sized pcap files. Even if you split, let’s say, a 25 terabyte PCAP up into smaller chunks, can you imagine how long it would … Read more
A honeypot is a form of deception technology used to observe threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP). I have deployed a customized version of the Cowrie honeypot in several regions, and I have one at home to capture residential IP space activity. The Honeypot Diaries will be a recurring series that I will use to share … Read more
This is the final part of a multipart blog post, read part one and two then continue here. In part 2, we simulated adversary interaction with our deployed tokens and then leveraged Windows Event Viewer to assess the generated artifacts. What follows will be several options for getting the audit logs from the endpoints to … Read more
A Splunk Search Head (SH) enables an analyst to query a Splunk Indexer for data in a distributed configuration. A Search Heads group that shares knowledge objects and settings is known collectively as a Search Head Cluster (SHC). Deploying a SHC provides high availability (HA) and many other benefits to your users. However, as you scale out … Read more
Splunk has built-in user authentication; however, if you have multiple deployments or a clustered environment, it makes sense to utilize centralized user management. FreeIPA provides a solution similar to a Domain Controller in an Active Directory (AD) environment. Setting up FreeIPA is outside the scope of this document, and we will instead focus on how to integrate Splunk … Read more
A threat feed is a collection of actionable information about threats that allows for mitigating harmful events. This blog post is concerned with developing an IP based threat feed or blacklist. We will look at how to gather, aggregate, enrich, and extract threat data for consumption. Gathering the threat data I have several servers in … Read more