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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!

    1

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    @crazycells good question. Gmail being provided by Google is going to be one of the more secure by default out of the box, although you have to bear in mind that you can have the best security in the world, but that is easily diluted by user decision.

    Obviously, it makes sense to secure all cloud based services with at least 2fa protection, or better still, biometric if available, but email still remains vastly unprotected (unless enforced in the sense of 2fa, which I know Sendgrid do) because of user choice (in the sense that users will always go for the path of least resistance when it comes to security to make their lives easier). The ultimate side effect of taking this route is being vulnerable to credentials theft via phishing attacks and social engineering.

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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.

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    @DownPW said in Setting for high load and prevent DDoS (sysctl, iptables, crowdsec or other):

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

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

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    @phenomlab

    No they have a free and pro console instance.
    We can see alert with IP, Source AS, scenario attack etc…

    Installation on the NODEBB server without problems. Very good tools

    cf7e5a89-84f4-435b-82eb-434c0bfc895e-image.png
    cc82a10e-a1f1-4fd8-a433-7c9b2d31f254-image.png

    1b7147b0-37c6-4d87-b4f1-a0fe92e74afd-image.png

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    –
    We can also do research on IPs via the crowdsec analyzer

    I believe it’s 500 per month in the Free version

    43bc8265-a57c-4439-829c-0bb8602d99b4-image.png

  • Mike Jonesundefined

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    phenomlabundefined

    @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

    <script> var myvalue = $('#id').val(); $(document).ready(function() { $.ajax({ type: "POST", url: "https://myserver/myfile.php?id=" + myvalue, success: function() { $("#targetdiv").load('myfile.php?id=myvalue #targetdiv', function() {}); }, //error: ajaxError }); return false; }); </script>

    Then collect that with PHP via a POST / GET request such as

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

    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

    <?php if(!defined('MyConst')) { die('Direct access not permitted'); } ?>

    then on the pages that you need to include it

    <?php define('MyConst', TRUE); ?>

    Obviously, access requests coming directly are not going via your chosen route, therefore, the connection will die because MyConst does not equal TRUE

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

    Would it be enough to just check if the number are a number 1-100 and if the drop down is one of the 5 specific words and then just not run the rest of the code if it doesn’t fit one of those perameters?

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

    Hope this is of some use to start with. Happy to elaborate if you’d like.

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