Enterprises today face a variety of security challenges, including cyberattacks, compliance requirements, and endpoint security controls. The threat landscape is constantly evolving, making it difficult for businesses to keep up with the latest security trends. Security teams use processes and security solutions to curb these challenges. These solutions include firewalls, antivirus, data loss prevention services, and XDR (Extended Detection and Response).
Wazuh is a free open source security platform that integrates XDR and SIEM (System Information and Event Management) capabilities. It consists of a universal security agent for collecting event data from various sources and a central component for event analysis, correlation and alerting. Core components include the Wazuh server, dashboards, and indexers. Wazuh provides a set of modules that can provide enhanced threat detection and response for on-premises and cloud workloads.
This article highlights Wazuh’s features that can help your organization’s security needs.
threat intelligence
Wazuh includes a MITER ATT&CK module with out-of-the-box threat detection rules. The MITER ATT&CK module provides details that enable threat hunters to recognize adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). These include details such as threat groups, software, mitigations, etc. You can use this information to narrow down threats or compromised endpoints in your environment. Wazuh threat detection rules are mapped against corresponding MITER ATT&CK IDs.
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| Figure 1: Wazuh MITER ATT&CK Dashboard |
Wazuh seamlessly integrates with 3rd party threat intelligence solutions such as VirusTotal, MISP, URLHaus and YARA. These integrations allow you to check file hashes, IP addresses, and URLs against perceived malicious indicators of compromise (IOCs). Integrating Wazuh with these solutions provides additional insight into potential threats, malicious activity, and IOCs, improving the overall security posture of your business.
A vulnerability is a security weakness or flaw that can be exploited by a threat to perform malicious activity on a computer system. Wazuh offers a Vulnerability Detector module that helps enterprises identify and prioritize vulnerabilities in their environment. This module uses data from multiple feeds such as Canonical, Microsoft, and the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) to provide real-time information about vulnerabilities.
Threat detection and response
Wazuh uses its modules, decoders, rulesets, and integrations with third-party solutions to detect and protect your digital assets from threats. These threats include malware, web and network attacks.
The Wazuh File Integrity Monitoring module monitors directories and reports file additions, deletions, and modifications. Used for auditing sensitive files, but can be combined with other integrations to detect malware. The rootcheck module is used to detect rootkit behavior such as hidden files, ports, and unusual processes. The Wazuh Active Response module provides automated response actions such as quarantining infected systems, blocking network traffic, and terminating ransomware processes. Together, these modules enable rapid response to mitigate the impact of cyberattacks.
The image below shows the combination of the FIM module, VirusTotal integration, and Active Response module in detecting and responding to malware downloaded to monitored endpoints.
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| Figure 2: Malicious files detected and removed from monitored endpoints |
Audit and regulatory compliance
Security auditing and compliance are two concepts that are important to businesses that aim to protect themselves from cyberattacks. A security audit is a systematic process of evaluating an organization’s information systems, practices, and procedures to identify vulnerabilities, assess risks, and ensure that security controls are working as intended. Regulatory compliance refers to the process of demonstrating that an organization complies with a set of established standards, regulations, or laws related to information security.
Wazuh helps businesses pass security audits and meet regulatory compliance requirements. Compliance standards provide a set of guidelines and best practices for ensuring the safety of an organization’s systems, networks, and data. Following these standards can reduce the chance of security breaches. Wazuh has various modules to help you meet compliance standards such as PCI DSS, GDPR, NIST, and more. In his article Using Wazuh SIEM and XDR Platforms to Meet PCI DSS Compliance, he demonstrates the key role Wazuh plays in maintaining an organization’s PCI compliance. The image below shows the Wazuh NIST dashboard.
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| Figure 3: Wazuh NIST Dashboard |
cloud security
Cloud platforms provide services that manage computing, storage, and network operations over the Internet. These cloud platforms are widely adopted by enterprises due to their easy access to resources, flexibility, and high scalability. As more organizations take advantage of the cloud, maintaining the security of their digital assets remains critical.
Wazuh is an integrated XDR and SIEM platform that provides visibility and security monitoring for cloud environments. Monitor and protect cloud services running on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It does this by collecting and analyzing security event data from various cloud components. Such data enables Wazuh to perform vulnerability detection, cloud compliance checks, security monitoring, and automated responses to detected threats.
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| Figure 4: Wazuh monitoring the AWS CloudTrail service |
hardening endpoints
The Wazuh SCA module performs system and application configuration assessments to ensure your hosts are secure and reduce your vulnerability surface. Wazuh uses policy files to scan endpoints looking for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. These policy files are included out-of-the-box and based on Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks. SCA scan results provide insight into the vulnerabilities present on monitored endpoints. These vulnerabilities range from configuration flaws to vulnerable installed versions of applications and services. Failed security checks are displayed with remediation, allowing system administrators to quickly resolve them.
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| Figure 5: Failed SCA check and repair of WordPress installation |
Open Source
Wazuh has a rapidly growing community where users, developers, and contributors can ask questions about the platform and share collaborative ideas. The Wazuh Community provides users with free support, resources, and documentation.
As an open source security platform, Wazuh facilitates flexibility and customization. Users can modify the source code or add new functionality to suit their specific needs. Wazuh’s source code is publicly available on the Wazuh GitHub repository for users who want validation checks and contributions.
Conclusion
Wazuh is a free open source platform with robust XDR and SIEM capabilities. With features such as log data analysis, file integrity monitoring, intrusion detection, and automated response, Wazuh enables companies to respond quickly and effectively to security incidents.
