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5 Ways to Get More Out of an OSSEC Host-Based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS) - Atomicorp - Unified Security Built on OSSEC

5 Ways to Get More Out of an OSSEC Host-Based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS)

Posted on by Dean Lombardo

By Atomicorp 

(Get more out of your OSSEC intrusion detection … not just rules and basic detection. With Atomic OSSEC, you get professional support, installation and configuration assistance, multiple threat feeds, vulnerability intelligence, active response (HIPS), FIM, SCAP and CIS compliance tools, web based graphical analysis, and more.)

 

Free open-source software and free security rules are great, we use them, too.

But it’s challenging to get the most out of a free ruleset unless you have developers able to add or adjust rules on an ongoing basis to balance an organization’s digital growth needs with security concerns and controls. Free OSSEC rules give you about 1,500 pre-built rules, but it’s solely a command line interface where the security team and stakeholders might struggle with the following:

Patching and managing applications and infrastructure. This includes your private network endpoints but also traffic and payload from connection points in the larger computing ecosystem such as web gateways, cloud access points and APIs, containers, and clusters, all representing the edge, where data is stored and security and privacy requirements need to be met. 

Proving compliance or security effectiveness. The cloud has brought complications to security and privacy compliance objectives. How can you protect and compliantly segment traffic you can’t see or that is out of your control? This has driven a need for endpoint tools that can deeply filter traffic and layer protection to and from the cloud, as well across internal servers, computers, and lateral pathways, to provide insight into all connecting endpoints and data flow.

Beating the high cost of insight and SIEM. To pull in security event data from a number of directions for analysis, an organization is challenged by costs. Each source of vendor protection might speak a different ‘language’ (i.e., be in a different format), and you are not only paying multiple protection vendors, but also manually trying to formalize the data in your SIEM. The risk of dark data (unseen information) is also a huge potential cost, particularly given the timely reality of Trojan horse-like zero day attacks. If you don’t have the right rules and automation, you might even have to hire someone to search your security log and respond. Further cost might come from cloud egress fees, where, if you outsource infrastructure, the cloud platform provider charges you to see your own data, including for security visibility and operations.

Flexible and evolving extended detection and response (XDR) and cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) capabilities are needed to secure and support today’s disparate endpoints, various OSs, and ubiquitous cloud access points. 

Atomic OSSEC HIDS for XDR and Cloud Workload Protection

You want to harness some automation and machine learning to stop threats on the fly and mitigate the challenges of security log management and analysis. Atomicorp offers XDR and cloud workload protection beyond the solid HIDS you expect from OSSEC+.

  1. Deepen and facilitate detection. Atomic OSSEC XDR is based on OSSEC, the mature and widely adopted ruleset that tens of thousands of organizations rely on for log-based intrusion detection. Atomic OSSEC brings powerful detection capabilities that are easy to scale, enable wide application integration, offer low-touch lightweight design, role-based access control, and require little patching.
  2. Strengthen protection and response. Response is a critical complement to detection. Atomic OSSEC offers agent management and active response across your computing endpoint architecture, enabling you to pinpoint risks, analyze and rank security events, automatically block threats, harden devices and systems, and reduce overall response times. Atomic OSSEC leverages more than 400 out-of-the-box connectors to collect log data and then routes critical events to any SIEM or other operational monitoring system, reducing SIEM integration and analysis costs. All other log data can be sent to cost effective cold storage, and there is zero data loss.
  3. Employ global threat intelligence. Data for incident response, vulnerability assessment, and risk management must be captured, analyzed and measured. Global crowdsourced threat intelligence tells you which threats are spreading across the globe in real time so you can bolster defense and cut the attack off at multiple penetration levels. Atomic OSSEC fortifies critical security performance and vulnerability analysis, and provides a management GUI to present results beyond the command line in the form of images, graphs, charts, patterns, and reports.
  4. Address that wide compliance challenge. Be able to meet a wide range of compliance requirements such as CIS, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST 800-53 and 800-171, FISMA, and JSIG via strong Atomic OSSEC FIM and audit control capabilites, as well as compliance templates. Capture artifacts, log data, and performance statistics for use in reports, audits, compliance, and more.
  5. Get support for your OSSEC initiatives. Be able to apply powerful file integrity monitoring (FIM), anti-malware, encryption, vulnerability scanning, device hardening and other active response methods across the evolving cloud infrastructure as well as legacy code installations (e.g., AIX, HP-UX, Solaris). Employ the rules to embody security holistically and from a defense-in-depth perspective to protect your organization from both perimeter and lateral attacks. Don’t wait for a vendor to patch your servers and additional endpoints. Get fortified widely and quickly with out-in-front security development practices (DevSecOps) that are flexible and agile enough for today’s hybrid cloud architectures.

Atomic OSSEC is built specifically for organizations that need to leverage OSSEC in large or mission critical environments. With a dedicated management console, over 5,000 pre-built OSSEC rules, compliance reporting, and more, Atomic OSSEC makes it easy to deploy, manage, and use OSSEC in any on-premise, cloud, or hybrid environment. (We’ll also manage the OSSEC-based security for you as part of a hosted service.)

Discover Atomic OSSEC.

Get a demo of Atomic OSSEC at work.

Download the file integrity monitoring (FIM) whitepaper.

Join our learning and support communities at forums and on Slack.

Watch how-to video demonstrations from the OSSEC 2021 conference.

Take web application firewall (WAF) functionality from our free ModSecurity offering and embed advanced security at your network edge (at web gateways and cloud access points). Get Free ModSecurity Rules.