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Network Security Monitoring

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  • Madchatthewundefined

    I am wondering what everyone is using for network security monitoring? I did a good search and there are so many options. I was also wondering if it is worth running a network monitoring software on a local network? Maybe it isn’t even worth running a tool like that on a local network? I don’t think people are trying to break into my local network, but was curious what others do.

    Say I have virtual servers running that have the network card bridged. Is it worth having monitoring software installed and running for them as well?

    phenomlabundefined 1 Reply
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  • Madchatthewundefined

    I found this video that monitors all sorts of things over the network. Hardware and such as well. He goes over and how to setup Whats Up Gold. It is free for your personal network and for business it costs money of course.

    Thoughts?

    @phenomlab if you don’t want videos like this on your site let me know and I won’t do that for future posts. You can also remove the video from this post as well if not allowed.

    phenomlabundefined 1 Reply
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  • phenomlabundefined

    @Madchatthew certainly worth monitoring, but for it to work correctly, the bridge card needs to be running in promiscuous mode otherwise packets will be discarded by the NIC itself.

    Are you looking specifically for security monitoring, or general performance monitoring also? I know that @DownPW has a lot of experience with Crowdstrike but that is essentially application layer rather than machine, so in the sense of the OSI model, it’s layer 7.

    I suspect you are looking for layer 1 or 2 which would be physical (1) or data (2). There are numerous security products out there (some really good open source ones also) but I prefer to tap into the network stream at layer 3, so in this example, you’d use a network switch and create a network tap or mirroring port and use another program to read and analyse that traffic.

    Taking this route means it’s agentless, and you don’t have to add machines manually. Really depends on what your requirements are.

    Author of OGProxy, Swatch, Threaded, Card, and most of Sudonix's bugs…

    Madchatthewundefined 1 Reply
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  • phenomlabundefined

    @Madchatthew absolutely no issue. Including any source material such as videos is actively encouraged as it saves other members having to search themselves.

    Author of OGProxy, Swatch, Threaded, Card, and most of Sudonix's bugs…

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  • Madchatthewundefined

    @phenomlab To be honest, I didn’t really know what I am looking for or what level of monitoring I should do or if I even need to do any monitoring. I know with what seems like an increase in hacking lately, that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

    I do like the sound of layer 3 monitoring so you don’t have to manually add machines. Do you have some examples of some of the open source software out there that does the layer 1 or 2 monitoring?

    @phenomlab said in Network Security Monitoring:

    @Madchatthew absolutely no issue. Including any source material such as videos is actively encouraged as it saves other members having to search themselves.

    Sounds good, thank you!

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  • phenomlabundefined

    @Madchatthew You could try this, but the hardware specs are insane.

    https://github.com/telekom-security/tpotce

    I’d couple this with Zabbix, which is an open source monitoring platform, but mostly geared towards operational monitoring rather than security.

    For that, take a look at OSSEC

    https://www.ossec.net/

    Author of OGProxy, Swatch, Threaded, Card, and most of Sudonix's bugs…

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  • Madchatthewundefined

    @phenomlab I will check those out. Thanks for sharing. I appreciate it!

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    @DownPW 🙂 most of this really depends on your desired security model. In all cases with firewalls, less is always more, although it’s never as clear cut as that, and there are always bespoke ports you’ll need to open periodically.

    Heztner’s DDoS protection is superior, and I know they have invested a lot of time, effort, and money into making it extremely effective. However, if you consider that the largest ever DDoS attack hit Cloudflare at 71m rps (and they were able to deflect it), and each attack can last anywhere between 8-24 hours which really depends on how determined the attacker(s) is/are, you can never be fully prepared - nor can you trace it’s true origin.

    DDoS attacks by their nature (Distributed Denial of Service) are conducted by large numbers of devices whom have become part of a “bot army” - and in most cases, the owners of these devices are blissfully unaware that they have been attacked and are under command and control from a nefarious resource. Given that the attacks originate from multiple sources, this allows the real attacker to observe from a distance whilst concealing their own identity and origin in the process.

    If you consider the desired effect of DDoS, it is not an attempt to access ports that are typically closed, but to flood (and eventually overwhelm) the target (such as a website) with millions of requests per second in an attempt to force it offline. Victims of DDoS attacks are often financial services for example, with either extortion or financial gain being the primary objective - in other words, pay for the originator to stop the attack.

    It’s even possible to get DDoS as a service these days - with a credit card, a few clicks of a mouse and a target IP, you can have your own proxy campaign running in minutes which typically involves “booters” or “stressers” - see below for more

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    in short if you have any advice to give to secure the best.

    It’s not just about DDos or firewalls. There are a number of vulnerabilities on all systems that if not patched, will expose that same system to exploit. One of my favourite online testers which does a lot more than most basic ones is below

    https://www.immuniweb.com/websec/

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    @elhana-fine Yes that will happen of of course if you still choose to restart the NGINX service after making a change and the test fails. The test on it’s own will state the error and the line number allowing you to fix that first 🙂

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    @mike-jones Hi Mike,

    There are multiple answers to this, so I’m going to provide some of the most important ones here

    JS is a client side library, so you shouldn’t rely on it solely for validation. Any values collected by JS will need to be passed back to the PHP backend for processing, and will need to be fully sanitised first to ensure that your database is not exposed to SQL injection. In order to pass back those values into PHP, you’ll need to use something like

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    <?php function getid($theid) { global $db; $stmt = $db->prepare("SELECT *FROM data where id = ?"); $stmt->execute([$theid]); while ($result= $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)){ $name = $result['name']; $address = $result['address']; $zip = $result['zip']; } return array( 'name' => $name, 'address' => $address, 'zip' => $zip ); } ?>

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    i am pretty sure the user could just use the path to the php file and just type a web address into the search bar

    This is correct, although with no parameters, no data would be returned. You can actually prevent the PHP script from being called directly using something like

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    @mike-jones said in Securing javascript -> PHP mysql calls on Website:

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    In my view, no, as this will expose the PHP file to SQL injection attack without any server side checking.

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