Even though there was a possibility of a zero-day, the researchers thought it was more likely that the servers’ root passwords were brute-forced, based on a log of a user attempting to log in as root multiple times over an 8-minute period from an IP address in Singapore before finally succeeding.

It all comes down to logging and then doing something with those logs.  Having a solution (www.logrhythm.com) that can help point out these types of items is critical.  Just to have logging turned on gets you nothing, you need to do something with these logs.  Having a solution in place and watching for anomalies like this could have helped to slow Duqu down.  Logs won’t stop the attackers but if we are being proactive and watching (with the correct solution) we would at least slow them down some.

As this also shows that attackers aren’t worried about people logging their activities because they know most organizations/admins aren’t doing anything with the logs until well after the fact.

One of the things that you need to be asking your SIEM/Log Management provider is how would they have picked up on something like this?  Can it be correlated/detected that it was coming from the same IP address and repeated attempts?  Most SIEM/Log Management vendors will tell you “sure we can do that”.  Well my next question would be: What if this was across multiple Operating Systems, could you detect it then?  Now for my shameless plug, with LogRhythm the answer is yes.  Some vendors expect you to be a subject matter expert across all Operating Systems, network devices and applications.  With LogRhythm you don’t need to be, our normalization handles that for you.  We can take being proactive to the next level with advanced correlation and SmartRemediation.

“How can I set the Windows Event Viewer to trigger when a certain event happens?” 

Well if you want to set a trigger for something very simple such as ‘when anyone logs in’ or ‘when an account gets created’ that is very simple.  Just right click on the event in the EventViewer and select “Attach Task to This Event…”, then select if you want Windows to launch a program, send an email or display a message. 

It’s that quick and easy if you want to look for something simple.  Now the question “when anyone logs in” is not quite so easy.  Becuase if you recall from an earlier blog post, there are different types of logins.  So if we just look for logins we will be flooded with triggers because of all the network (type 3) and service (type 5) logins that happen all day everyday. 

 The question that arrises most often is “Can event viewer let me know when someone does a remote desktop to one of my servers?”  The answer to that is no.  Take the following screen shot for example.

Microsoft doesn’t give us the ability to look for anything in the event message body, such as the logon type.   But wait you say, EventViewer can do a trigger that will launch a program or script, we can just do it that way.  Not so fast, the program option doesn’t pass the event to the program or script.  So we are unable to parse the message for our logon type or other information.

So the next question comes, how can we trigger (alarm/alert) for specific information that is located in the event message.  Well you have 2 options, 1st is to write your own script (or get one from the internet) that will parse the Event Log and look for your information.  2nd would be to use a SIEM/Log Management tool such as LogRhythm.   Having done manual log management (and via scripts) for many years this could be a painful option.  I’ve been in the SIEM/Log Management business since 2004, I can tell you that many Admins have benefited from letting someone else doing all the heavy lifting of gathering the logs and then setting up alarms very quickly to do just what people have been asking me.

LogRhythm

Sept 15, 2011

HIPAA & HITECH Act | Get ready for Tougher Privacy, Security Rules and Enforcement

Prism Microsystems

**Feb 14, 2011; Do to some unforseen issues at Prism I can no longer in good faith promote their product or services and I have removed all links to their website.

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We came across a scenario where one of our sessions that we need to track events on, recorded only 683 events (rdp logoff) but zero 682 events (rdp logon).

I put together a detailed email explaining to him why/what was really happening and thought it would be good to share.

I want to clarify event id 682 for you, it’s not a RDP Logon event, it’s a Session Reconnected event.  That’s why you see 683 events without any 682 events.

 If you want to track when someone logs onto a system via RDP you need to look for event id 528 with a logon type of 10.

 So here is what you can expect to see in the logs (all of these events are in the Security log on the system SERVER1):

 At 9:22 am Isaac remotes into Server1:

Event ID: 528

 Successful Logon:
  User Name: isaac
  Domain: XXXXXXXX
  Logon ID: (0×0,0x2505AC69)
  Logon Type: 10
  Logon Process: User32
  Authentication Package: Negotiate
  Workstation Name: SERVER1
  Logon GUID: {f9c49597-2dcc-19cb-32cb-89a0e776ec9c}
  Caller User Name: SERVER1$
  Caller Domain: XXXXXXXX
  Caller Logon ID: (0×0,0x3E7)
  Caller Process ID: 2380
  Transited Services: -
  Source Network Address: xxx.xxx.xxx.145
  Source Port: 18573

 Then at 9:42:06 am Isaac clicks the “X” in the upper corner of the RDP session (does not logout, but disconnects)

Event ID: 683

 Session disconnected from winstation:
  User Name: isaac
  Domain: XXXXXXXX
  Logon ID: (0×0,0x2505AC69)
  Session Name: RDP-Tcp#1
  Client Name: Workstation1
  Client Address: xxx.xxx.xxx.145

 Then at 9:42:37 am Isaac re-connects to the RDP session on Server1

Event ID: 682

 Session reconnected to winstation:
  User Name: isaac
  Domain: XXXXXXXX
  Logon ID: (0×0,0x2505AC69)
  Session Name: RDP-Tcp#2
  Client Name: Workstation1
  Client Address: xxx.xxx.xxx.145

 Then at 11:56 am Isaac logs off the RDP session

Event ID: 551

 User initiated logoff:
  User Name: isaac
  Domain: XXXXXXXX
  Logon ID: (0×0,0x2505ac69)

 Now let’s analyze how we tie all these together.  The 1^st event the 528 tells us how the connection was established, Logon Type: 10 (highlighted in yellow) which is a RemoteInteractive (aka RDP or Terminal Session) (for other logon types see this list).  This event also confirms that the RDP session was done to a system called Server1 (noted in the Workstation Name line), it also tells us from which system the RDP session was done xxx.xxx.xxx.145 (the Source Network Address line).  We also get the Logon ID which is a HEX code (highlighted in blue).  This Logon ID allows us to connect all of the activity that Isaac does while the RDP session is active (with the right auditing turned on), we can track what files/folders were touched, what processes were launched, etc.  It also allows us to tell if he disconnects (683) or logs off (551) the RDP session.  If he disconnects we can then also track when he reconnects (682).

Hope this helps.

When it comes to Directory Services Auditing I always tell people less is more, if you already understand what the other audit policies give you then you can get 85% to 90% of what you need from those.  There are somethings that you will have to get via Directory Services Auditing there’s just no getting around it.  But just as with the case of Object Access be very carefull what you turn on or you will flood yourself with junk noise events.  The major pain is that all events generated by Directory Services use the same event id no matter what action you are doing and are very cryptic.

Here is the email:

“ As we talked about on the phone today there is a lot of auditing turned on where Microsoft hasn’t given very much information about what it generates and even some that are currently not used.  Example: Intellimirror-Group is used by remote boot legacy for managing groups of server machines and is currently not used.   Based on the screen shot you sent me I can see that the objects are currently being monitored which are generating a lot of noise events for you.  You might be better suited to audit the properties instead of the objects.  Example, if you want to know when a user has been given access to someone else’s inbox you need to monitor for changes to the property: msExchMailboxSecurityDescriptor; or if you want to know who made a GPO change then you need to monitor for changes to the properties: gpLink and gPOptions.  Most of the information that you can find via MSDN in regards to these audit objects is related to developers and not what the audit trail will give you.  Keep in mind that Microsoft considers the Directory Services auditing a low level audit, so the events that are generated are pretty cryptic in nature and all use the same event id. 

 There are a few of the objects that you would want to monitor to help get a more full picture of what is happening such as: Computer, User, OU, Shares, Group objects.  Monitoring these will give you things such as what OU a user was created in, where the Account Mgmt auditing does not give you this.  Also Account Mgmt auditing does not give you OU auditing (as again Microsoft considers this to be a low level object).

 In most companies it’s easy to turn on Auditing but very difficult to get it turned off and this is where Admins get themselves and others into a painful spot.  How to prove what is not needed when Microsoft doesn’t document what the auditing does or doesn’t do.

 Other examples:

msSFU30MailAliases – represents UNIX mail file data

nisMap – contains the generic abstraction of an NIS map

oncRpc – represents an abstraction of the Open Network Computing (ONC) Remote Procedure Call (RPC) binding

msRTCSIP-EdgeProxy – this attribute is reserved for future use

msRTCSIP-TrustedWebComponentsServerData – this attribute is reserved for future use”

Here are a few of the links where I pulled this data from:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms680938(VS.85).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms985886(EXCHG.65).aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb663647.aspx