This month has been a big deal for IT logging of windows endpoints. Sysmon v10 was released last Tuesday and it includes the major changes of DNS logging and OriginalFileName reporting for windows events. If you've ever tried to set up windows DNS logging before, you understand how awesome this is. This post is all about the new functionality and how to make use of it in Gravwell.
We've had some benchmarking requests from multiple organizations struggling with ingest performance from Elasticsearch, so we're publishing them here. The latest Gravwell release marks a significant improvement in ingest and indexing performance and this post covers the nitty gritty details. Better ingest performance means reduced infrastructure cost, less dropped data, and faster time-to-value. See how Gravwell stacks up.
Before founding Gravwell, I was doing quite a bit of vehicle cybersecurity. Lately I haven't had much opportunity for that kind of fun -- turns out founding a company is time consuming work. Today is a throwback Thursday, however, as I'll be presenting on CANBus and vehicle security at the local DEFCON meetup. We didn't build Gravwell for car hacking but I gotta say, having Gravwell years ago would have made my life a lot easier…
We are excited to introduce autoextractors with Gravwell version 3.0.2. Autoextractors make it easy for regex gurus and binary ninjas to generate extractions and share them in a portable format. Autoextractors can dramatically simplify the process of performing field extractions from unstructured data without complicated time-of-ingest data definitions; they can built and shared by ninjas and and used by us mere mortals.
We're continuing to work with investigative reporters to research unscrupulous activity on social media. Most recently, Engadget published a piece on nefarious political influencers on Reddit. We’ve written in the past about analyzing social media comments, but didn’t make the ingesters publicly available. With an increasing need for research in this area, we decided that releasing our Reddit and Hacker News ingesters could help new users get started with Gravwell even faster, so we open-sourced them. Read on to learn how to get the ingesters, how to run them, and how to get started with the data.
Gravwell recently introduced a new ingester which accepts entries via HTTP POST requests. Now it's easy to send arbitrary data to Gravwell via scripts using only the curl command. In this blog post, we'll use the HTTP ingester to build a weather-monitoring dashboard!
For the 2018 Super Computing Conference (SC18, held in Dallas, TX), Gravwell provided our analytics platform to the Network Security team. These brave souls were responsible for cyber security on a network consisting of $52 million in contributed hardware, software, and services plus 4.02 Terabits per second of external capacity. This means that not only does the SCinet Network Security team need to protect SCinet from the world, it needs to protect the world from SCinet.
Huge Gravwell updates today!
Thanks for your patience during this short period of radio silence, but it’s been for good reason. Today we’re happy to announce Gravwell version 3 which comes with a whole slew of delicious features and improvements.
The 2018 development year was primarily focused on improving search and ingest performance, scalability, and stability. We’ve made tremendous strides on this front and I’m excited to talk briefly about those here and in greater detail during the coming weeks. Our 2019 has a strong focus on improving out-of-the-box functionality -- keep reading for more info about the update and exciting plans for this year.
One of the biggest complaints that’s heard across the industry is that of cost. “Too expensive” or “untenable pricing scale” are things we have been hearing from colleagues at conferences and on forums for years. Years! Yet we’re still stuck with this extremely frustrating pricing model that disincentivizes people from using the very tool they purchased. What do I mean? Let’s dive in.
In this detailed technical guide we’ll cover analyzing Bro security analytics with Gravwell. Bro is a passive network security sensor designed to provide a plugin friendly detection framework. There are a myriad of commercial Bro vendors and almost as many ways to format and store the output. Gravwell provides an efficient and simple interface for acquiring, storing, and querying Bro data.