Automation on Lets Automate It

Introducing Atomic Operator

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 12:00:36 -0600

One of the major benefits of Atomic Red Team is that it enables security teams to understand how adversaries leverage MITRE® ATT&CK techniques in the real world, and I’ve been a big fan for years. To me, Atomic Red Team is more than a repository of tests (aka atomics), it’s also a knowledge base, training tool, and more.

Each atomic in the library simulates a known adversary behavior associated with a given technique. Each of these tests are meant to help security professionals understand how a technique works (in other words, what malicious looks like) and enable them to test their defensive controls.

Atomic Red Team Testing With Swimlane

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 11:54:39 -0600

Today, Swimlane is excited to announce that we are releasing a new SSP (Swimlane Solutions Package) for use within the Swimlane platform. This SSP will enable organizations to automate the testing of their defenses using Atomic Red Team using our new open-source project called atomic-operator.

When using this SSP organizations can gain an understanding of their defensive posture against tests mapped to MITRE ATT&CK techniques. By using this use case you can correlate detections of these tests against their existing automation and log sources thus giving them fast feedback on their defensive posture based on tests available within Atomic Red Team.

Common Rest Api Authentication Methods Explained

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 11:58:59 -0600

When it comes to implementing automation and orchestration, it is critical to understand how authentication works with APIs. The majority of the products in your environment likely have some sort of authentication mechanism. You need to know the nuances and differences between various authentication methods in order to automate communications with those APIs. In this blog post, I aim to help you understand by breaking down three different API authentication methods.

Swimlane Releases Elk Tls Docker

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 11:57:08 -0600

At Swimlane, we love to automate but we also love building and sharing open-source software (OSS) to help security teams. We are proud to announce that we have released a new open-source project called elk-tls-docker to make it easier for you to test and deploy Elastic Stack by automating the creation of several Elastic open-source software solutions.

Elk-tls-docker assists with setting up aand creating an Elastic Stack using either self-signed certificates or using Let’s Encrypt certificates (using SWAG). This project was built so that you can test and use built-in features under Elastic Security, like detections, signals, cases, Elastic Endpoint and other features.

Automating Attck Testing With Soar and Atomic Red Team

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 12:33:03 -0600

MITRE ATT&CK is the defacto framework for organizations to measure their defense posture. ATT&CK provides categorical verticals in the form of tactics, which align to the common methodologies attackers use. Within these verticals are a set (and subsets) of common ways in which attackers accomplish a tactic (vertical). These are known as techniques.

Some techniques may be common across multiple operating systems. This usually equates to a broad definition of a technique. As defenders, this means we must understand how a single technique may be implemented on multiple platforms—which can be difficult for many, including myself. Luckily, organizations like Red Canary have provided our community with a rich framework to assist with the testing of these techniques.

Making MITRE ATT&CK Actionable

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 12:33:03 -0600

The Swimlane Deep Dive team is excited to announce the release of pyattck 2.0 and an equivalent PowerShell version called PSAttck. These open-source tools provide security operations centers (SOCs), defenders and offensive security teams with external data points that enrich MITRE ATT&CK by providing potential commands, queries and even detections for specific techniques. Additionally, these data points enable context related to specific attacker actors or groups, as well as details about different tools used by malicious actors.

Responding to Insider Threats With Soar

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 12:37:11 -0600

Insider threats occur when an individual with ties to an organization misuses their access for malicious intent, such as stealing intellectual property or other data. Detecting insider threats can be difficult. But by using a security information and event management (SIEM) system or data loss prevention (DLP) products, you can create alerts to detect the exfiltration of data leaving your organization that is unauthorized or unexpected.

Once you have detected these events, your security operations center (SOC) needs to investigate rapidly. Utilizing Swimlane and our Insider Threat Use Case, you can investigate and respond to these insider threats swiftly and accurately.

Identify Malicious Domains Using Soar

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 12:38:39 -0600

Domain Squatting, typosquatting and IDN homograph attacks are commonplace when it comes to phishing and other forms of social engineering. Attackers use domain squatting and typosquatting of domains to trick users into providing their credentials, distribute malware, harm an organization’s reputation, or otherwise maliciously impersonate a legitimate domain. We’ve discussed this topic before and have developed a unique use case with Swimlane to detect this malicious activity automatically.

Recently, we began to monitor domains related to coronavirus (COVID-19), knowing there would be an increase in traffic to research the outbreak, which could be exploited by bad actors. Even though not all of these domains are necessarily malicious or focused on spoofing (or typosquatting) techniques, we decided to use this use case to identify any registered domains related to “corona” and “covid.” Over the last 2 weeks, we have seen 5054 corona-related domains being registered.

You Dont Have Windows 7 in Your Environment Do You

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 12:40:08 -0600

Today is the day. Microsoft Windows 7 is officially end-of-life (EOL). The Windows 7 operating system was released on October 22, 2009. For 10 years now, IT and system administrators around the globe have relied on their trusty old Windows 7 OS. I mean, it was a step beyond Windows XP for sure. With EOL here, have you migrated all of your systems to Windows 10?

If you have not migrated, you definitely should. Here are several reasons why you should from a security perspective:

Every Security Team Is a Software Team Now

Thu, 01 Aug 2019 14:40:36 -0500

Building and facilitating a culture with continuous collaboration between engineers and security forces is becoming the new philosophy in security, which is why I am stoked for this year’s Black Hat USA keynote speaker: Dino Dai Zovi, staff security engineer at Square.

“Every Security Team is a Software Team Now” promises to dive into the latest iteration of security operations as current security teams morph into in-house security software teams, delivering multi-vertical value through self-service platforms and tools. Because of today’s growing and evolving threat landscape, security teams need to provide secure methods for both business and engineering teams to conduct daily business.

Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Detection Queries

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 14:37:17 -0500

Recently, I shared on Twitter how you could run a query to detect if a user has clicked on a link within their Outlook using Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (MDATP). If you are not familiar, MDATP is available within your Microsoft 365 E5 license and is an enhancement to the traditional Windows Defender you might be used to.

What is Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection?

Microsoft says that “Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection is a platform designed to help enterprise networks prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to advanced threats.” MDATP offers quite a few endpoints that you can leverage in both incident response and threat hunting.

Swimlane's Research Teams Open Sources pyattck

Thu, 11 Jul 2019 14:34:27 -0500

As security teams adopt the Mitre ATT&CK Framework to help them identify gaps in their defenses, having a way to identify what malware and tools are being used by specific actors or groups becomes more critical. Additionally, having a way to identify these relationships programatically is even more critical.

Today, we are excited to announce the Swimlane research team has released pyattck — a Python package to interact with the Mitre ATT&CK Framework. There are many different open-source projects being released on a daily basis, but we wanted to provide a straightforward Python package that allows the user to identify known relationships between all verticals of the Mitre ATT&CK Framework.

Swimlane Open Sources graphish to Help SecOps Teams

Wed, 19 Jun 2019 14:31:46 -0500

While having a conversation on Twitter about Microsoft Graph API I was convinced that the traditional Exchange eDiscovery features were not available in the Microsoft Graph API. Boy was I wrong.

After stumbling across a few endpoints I had not seen previously, I decided to write a python package called graphish. graphish is an open-source python package Swimlane is open-sourcing that will enable IT, security operations (SecOps), developers and others to search and delete email messages from mailboxes using the Microsoft Graph API.

Swimlane Research Team Open Sources py-ews

Wed, 22 May 2019 14:27:42 -0500

Phishing impacts every organization, and security operations (SecOps) teams need to act quickly to remediate and prevent unknown threats within their email infrastructure. To help combat these threats, the Swimlane research team has open sourced py-ews to enable security and IT teams to interact with Microsoft Exchange Web Services (EWS) using Python.

Why py-ews?

Organizations continue to battle against malicious phishing emails in their email environments, but security and IT teams have limited visibility into what currently resides in their users’ mailboxes. py-ews was written to give control back to your security and IT teams so they can remediate threats faster.

Automate Employee Off Boarding Process With Swimlane

Wed, 08 May 2019 14:25:25 -0500

As more organizations discontinue internal services and begin adopting an increasing number of third-party *aaS-based services, ensuring the appropriate access is revoked in a timely manner is critical. By using our new employee off-boarding use case, you can automatically gather historical data, add a user to a monitoring watch list, and finally remove access when it is time to off-board an employee.

The employee off-boarding use case contains two distinct applications to assist an organization with managing their employee off-boarding process. The first is the employee application, which contains all relevant information about the employee as well as references to the second application: assets. The assets application contains individual assets to which the employee has access. These assets can be applications, services or hardware.

Automated Malware Analysis and Reverse Engineering With Soar

Thu, 14 Mar 2019 14:10:25 -0500

We all know that security operations (SecOps) teams are overwhelmed by the extreme number of alerts they receive on a daily basis. Organizations are being attacked from all fronts, whether they know it or not. These attacks vary from social engineering, malicious emails, vulnerable services and applications, misconfiguration (job fatigue), etc.

Traditionally in a security operations center (SOC), malware analysis—more specifically reverse engineering—is conducted by a highly trained member of the security team (depending on your size, this may be multiple individuals). A SOC may receive hundreds, even thousands, of alerts about potentially malicious files from users reporting malicious messages to EDR (endpoint detection and response) to workstation/server event logs.

How to Setup a Hugo Website on GitHub

Sun, 26 Aug 2018 16:07:25 -0400

I recently transitioned my blog over to GitHub Pages from WordPress. I was using the free version from WordPress.org and I wanted more granular control over the layout. Additionally, I wanted to automate my blog publishing and social media notifications; the free version of WordPress didn’t meet my needs. So I looked around and eventually fell in love with Hugo! This post outlines how to go about setting up a GitHub Pages website/blog using Hugo.