DNS auditing is an integral part of any I.T. security program. Name resolutions can act as a great tip for discovering malware, command and control streams, or misbehaving employees. Acquiring DNS audit data can be difficult with some DNS servers (*cough* Windows *cough*); for this post we are going to show an extremely easy method of getting DNS audit data directly into Gravwell.

Gravwell Community Edition is perfect for monitoring your home network. With a generous 2GB/day ingest quota, you can capture netflow records, DNS requests, WiFi hotspot associations, and more. In this blog post, we’ll show how to ingest and analyze netflow records. We’ll assume you’ve already set up a Gravwell instance as described in the quickstart (https://dev.gravwell.io/docs/#!quickstart/community-edition.md); for this post, we’ll assume the Gravwell instance is at 192.168.1.52. Your instance will almost certainly be different, so be sure to substitute your own information.

To celebrate the release of the Gravwell Community Edition we are also releasing a standalone collectd ingester. Collectd is an excellent tool for monitoring the health of hardware, systems, and applications. For this post we will be demonstrating the installation and configuration of collectd to monitor the health and status of a few machines. We will be providing dashboard import codes so that you can quickly and easily import our ready made dashboards. The collectd ingester is part of the core suite of ingesters and is open source on github.

Back when we released the first version of Gravwell we immediately began sharing with friends and colleagues. Those initial testers primarily used Gravwell to monitor their home networks. They found rogue devices, neighbors leaching WiFi, poorly behaving IOT devices, and even some children that were playing video games when they should have been in bed. There was one problem, our friends wanted to give Gravwell to their friends but we aren't really a consumer software company. Our from-scratch secret sauce is what enables such game-changing pricing for larger enterprises but because we don't price on the data drip model it doesn't work for very small deployments. All that changes with the community edition...

We're excited to join with Nozomi Networks in announcing our integration partnership which was piloted in the ICS Village at the RSA Sandbox in San Francisco earlier this year. Attendees at RSA were also able to see the first glimpse of the newly unveiled ICS Village. For those unfamiliar with conference villages, the idea is to create a hands-on learning environment for security professionals to learn, hack, or break equipment and software that they may not experience on a day-to-day basis. The Gravwell founders have a long history in the ICS space and we believe in the village mission as we think that ICS/SCADA (more so than most industries) could benefit from some disruption and fresh ideas. The ICS Village can be found at many events this year including DEFCON and EnergySec (full event schedule can be found at https://www.icsvillage.com/events).

Thanks to Gravwell's Google PubSub ingester, it's easy to collect logs and other data from services deployed in the Google Cloud Platform. In this blog post, we'll show how to set up Gravwell in GCP and ingest system logs from your virtual machines.

With the release of Gravwell 2.0, Gravwell customers can now deploy multiple webservers tied to a central storage system. This means you can deploy multiple webservers behind a load balancer for better search performance; the webservers synchronize resources, user accounts, dashboards, and search history behind the scenes so users don’t need to worry about which server they’re actually using.

Update (1/24/2019)

This post is mostly about building your own docker images. If you're interested in getting up and running fast using Gravwell+Docker, head over to our docs that cover our pre-built images: 

https://dev.gravwell.io/docs/#!configuration/docker.md

Overview

For this blog post we are going to go over the deployment of a distributed Docker-based Gravwell cluster. We will use Docker and a few manageability features to very quickly build and deploy a cluster of Gravwell indexers. By the end of the post we will have deployed a 6 node Gravwell cluster, a load balancing federator, and a couple ingesters. Also, the six node “cluster” is also going to absolutely SCREAM, collecting over 4 million entries per second on a single Ryzen 1700 CPU. You read that right, we are going to crush the ingest rate of every other unstructured data analytics solution available on a single $250 CPU.  Lets get started.

This week marks the release of a Gravwell version 2. It’s been a journey with plenty of long days and nights but we’re really excited about the new capabilities. We’ll be publishing a series of blog posts which go into details of the major points, but I’d like to discuss the highlights.

Shmoocon, an InfoSec conference held annually by The Shmoo Group since 2005, is held early each year in Washington, D.C. ShmooCon is a purposely smaller conference, focused on bringing original research to attendees and supporting networking. ShmooCon XIV was held January 19-21 at the Washington Hilton (for those history buffs out there, you might recall that ARPANET made its debut at this hotel in 1972). It is important to us at Gravwell to be involved in the community, so I jumped at the chance to attend this year's Shmoo!