Incident response is a structured approach to managing and resolving security breaches or cyber attacks. Security teams must overcome challenges such as timely detection, comprehensive data collection, and coordinated action to improve preparedness. Improving these areas ensures a quick and effective response, minimizing damage and speeding up recovery.
Problems in responding to incidents
Incident response presents several challenges that must be addressed to ensure rapid and effective recovery from cyber attacks. The following section lists some of these issues.
- Timeliness: One of the main challenges in incident response is resolving incidents quickly enough to minimize damage. Delays in response can lead to new compromises and increased recovery costs.
- Information correlation: Security teams often struggle to effectively collect and correlate relevant data. Without a full overview, it becomes difficult to understand the full scope and impact of an incident.
- Coordination and communication: Incident response requires coordination between various parties, including technical teams, management, and external partners. Poor communication can lead to confusion and ineffective responses.
- Resource constraints: Many organizations operate with limited security resources. Understaffed teams may find it difficult to handle multiple incidents simultaneously, leading to problems with prioritization and possible oversight.
Stages of response to an incident
- Preparation involves creating an incident response plan, training teams, and setting up the right tools to detect and respond to threats.
- Identification this is the next important step. It relies on effective monitoring to quickly and accurately alert you to suspicious activity.
- Maintenance takes immediate action to limit the spread of the incident. This includes short-term efforts to isolate the breach and long-term strategies to secure the system before it becomes fully functional.
- Eradication involves the elimination of the main causes of the incident. This includes removing malware and patching exploited vulnerabilities.
- Recovery involves restoring systems and monitoring them closely to ensure they are clean and functioning properly after an incident.
- Lessons learned involves reviewing the incident and responding to it. This step is vital to improving future responses.
How Wazuh Improves Incident Response Readiness
Wazuh is an open source platform that offers unified Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and advanced detection and response (XDR) capabilities for a variety of workloads in cloud and on-premises environments. Wazuh performs log data analysis, file integrity monitoring, threat detection, real-time alerting, and automated incident response. The section below shows how Wazuh improves incident response.
Automated incident response
Wazuh’s active response module triggers actions in response to specific events on monitored endpoints. If an alert meets certain criteria, such as a specific rule ID, severity level, or rule group, the module initiates a predetermined action to resolve the incident. Security administrators can configure automatic actions to respond to specific security incidents.
Implementing active response scripts in Wazuh involves defining commands and configuring responses. This ensures scenarios are executed under the right conditions, helping organizations tailor incident response to their unique security needs. An overview of the implementation process can be:
- Definition of a team: Define the command in the Wazuh Manager configuration file, specifying the location of the script and the required parameters. For example:
quarantine-host quarantine_host.sh srcip
- Active response configuration: Configure an active response to define execution conditions by associating the command with specific rules and setting execution parameters. For example:
quarantine-host any 10 600
- Association rules: A custom active response will be associated with specific rules in the Wazuh ruleset to ensure that the script is run when the appropriate alerts are triggered.
This implementation process allows security teams to effectively automate responses and customize their incident response strategies.
Default security actions
Active Response Wazuh automatically performs some specific actions in response to certain security alerts by default on both Windows and Linux endpoints. These activities include, but are not limited to:
Known attacker blocking
Wazuh can block known attackers by adding their IP addresses to a reject list as soon as an alert is triggered. This proactive response ensures that attackers are quickly disconnected from targeted systems or networks.
The process typically involves continuous monitoring of log data and network traffic to detect compromise or anomalous behavior. Predefined Wazuh rules trigger an alert when suspicious activity is detected. Wazuh’s active response module executes a script to update firewall rules or network access control lists, blocking the malicious IP address. The response is logged and notifications are sent to security officials for further investigation.
This use case uses a public IP reputation database, such as Alienvault’s IP reputation database or AbuseIPDB, which contains IP addresses flagged as malicious, to identify and block known threats. The image below shows the identification and blocking of a malicious IP address based on the IP reputation database.
Detect and remove malware with Wazuh
Wazuh monitors file activity on endpoints using its File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) capability, threat intelligence integration, and predefined rules to detect unusual patterns that indicate potential malware attacks. Alerts are triggered when changes to files are detected that match known malware behavior. Wazuh’s active response module then initiates a script to delete malicious files to ensure they cannot be executed or cause further damage.
All activities are logged and detailed notifications are generated for security personnel. These logs include information about the detected anomaly and the actions taken in response, showing the state of the affected endpoint. Security teams can use detailed logs and data from Wazuh to investigate the attack and implement additional remediation measures.
The image below shows how Wazuh detects malware using VirusTotal, and Wazuh’s proactive response removes detected malware.
Application of the policy
Account lockout is a security measure that protects against brute force attacks by limiting the number of login attempts a user can make within a specified time. Organizations can use Wazuh to automatically enforce security policies, such as disabling a user’s account after multiple failed password attempts.
Wazuh uses disable-account, a ready-made active response script, to disable an account after three failed authentication attempts. In this use case, the user is blocked for five minutes:
disable-account local 120100 300
In the image below, Wazuh’s active response module disables the user account on the Linux endpoint and automatically re-enables it after 5 minutes.
Customizable security actions
Wazuh also provides flexibility, allowing users to evolve custom active response scripts in any programming language, allowing them to tailor responses to the unique requirements of their organization. For example, a Python script can be developed to quarantine an endpoint by changing firewall settings.
Integration with third-party incident response tools
Wazuh integrates with various third-party incident response tools, extending its capabilities and providing a more comprehensive security solution. This integration allows organizations to leverage existing security infrastructure investments while leveraging the capabilities of Wazuh.
For example, Wazuh’s integration with Shuffle, a security, automation and response (SOAR) platform, enables the creation of sophisticated automated workflows that streamline incident response processes.
Similarly, increasing response to incidents with Wazuh and DFIR-IRIS integration provides an insightful combination of digital forensics and incident response (DFIR). DFIR-IRIS is a universal incident response framework that, when integrated with Wazuh, offers advanced incident investigation and mitigation capabilities.
These integrations can help:
- Automated ticket generation in IT service management (ITSM) systems.
- Orchestrated threat discovery to enrich alert data.
- Coordinated response across multiple security tools.
- Custom reporting and notification workflows.
For example, when Wazuh detects a phishing email containing a malicious link, an incident ticket is automatically created in the ITSM system and forwarded to the appropriate team for immediate attention. At the same time, Wazuh queries the threat intelligence platform to enrich the alert data with additional context about the malicious link, such as its origin and associated threats. The security orchestration tool automatically isolates the affected endpoint and blocks the malicious IP on all network devices. Individual reports and notifications are created and sent to the appropriate parties, ensuring they are informed of the incident and the actions taken.
Using these integrations, security services can respond quickly and effectively to a phishing attack, minimizing potential damage and preventing further spread. It improves incident response readiness through streamlined and automated processes that facilitate the integration of third-party tools with Wazuh.
Conclusion
Improving incident response preparedness is critical to minimizing the effects of cyber attacks. Wazuh provides a comprehensive solution to help your organization achieve this with its real-time visibility, automated response capabilities, and the ability to integrate with third-party tools.
Using Wazuh, security services can manage incidents, reduce response times and ensure robust security. Learn more about Wazuh by viewing our documentation and joining us community professionals.
