I talked about the MITRE ATT&CK framework and how it can help you determine possible threats and threat actors’ techniques so that you can better focus your limited resources on the more likely threats.
The next question you might have is, “Am I being attacked?” and “Are my defenses working?”
To answer that question, you need to know what is happening on your network. To know what is happening on your network, you need to log activity from a few different sources.
Take your typical network that consists of a wired network (the PC connected to the switch) and some wireless laptops (connected to the wireless access point). The switch and the access point connect to a router and then to the firewall.
If you want to know what is going on in your network, you want to see the activity (traffic) that is flowing on the wireless access point, the switch, the router and the firewall. To do that, you have to log the devices and traffic on your wireless and wired networks as well the flow of traffic between the wired and wireless network and the flow of traffic between the router and the firewall.
Typically, you would have the access logs or system logs from each of these devices sent to a central collector, called (surprise!) the system log server, or syslog server. Your network would now look something like this:
Now that you are collecting this traffic information on a daily basis, you can get a good sense of what ‘normal’ traffic looks like. And you can then run searches (usually automated) that look at the log data and tell you if any odd or suspicious traffic is occurring.
You can search the syslog server for bad traffic coming from the internet to your firewall and confirm that the firewall is blocking the traffic. Or, you can confirm that you only allow certain kinds of traffic to leave your network to prevent private or sensitive data from leaving your network (think PII, HIPAA, intellectual property, CUI, etc.) via Dropbox or Google Drive or Box, for example. By checking the firewall logs, you can tell that your data is not leaving your network through the firewall.
You can search the syslog server for unknown devices on the wireless or wired network. You would already know which devices should be on the network because you should already know what devices you own or have provisioned for your users. If a new device shows up in the wireless log or the wired (switch) log, you then know that you have to find out what that device is. How did it get there? Did someone bring in their own wireless access device so they can get a better signal in their office? Did they bring in a wireless printer so they can print in their office? By looking at the logs for those two networks, you can determine that.
Your network team knows if traffic from the wired network should be allowed to flow to the wireless network or flow in the opposite direction. Maybe you allow that kind of traffic flow; maybe you don’t. Either way, with a syslog server you can confirm that only approved traffic is flowing on the wireless or wired networks by looking at the traffic logs from the router.
This is a simple example to help you visualize how collecting this network traffic allows you to see if the controls (access control lists [ACLs], firewall rules, network access control [NAC] rules, etc.) are working as you expect.
In my next blog post, I’ll add in other data points (antivirus software, Windows event logs, web server logs, etc.) you can gather from the syslog server to give you an even better picture of what is happening on your network.
