E.U. DORA – Threat-Led Penetration Testing, what is it?

Until the creation of the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) (2022/2554), there hasn’t been much need for those of us in the U.S. to be aware of Threat-Led Penetration Testing (TLPT). DORA’s text also isn’t explicitly clear around what this TLPT is, or what makes it distinctly different from the average penetration testing. …

Implementation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and LLMs for Documentation Parsing

A while ago I had the opportunity to explore the use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with the use of both internal and public LLMs, including various GPT and Llama models. The opportunities here are extensive, both for good, as well as harm if not implemented with proper oversight. Here’s a high level overview of that …

Wazuh Alerts – Hierarchy and Custom Rules

Wazuh provides and extremely valuable view into the security health of your systems. However, there are times where the default, out-of-the-box rules don’t work well for you. There’s a nice tutorial on custom rules in the Wazuh documentation, however, it wasn’t apparently clear to me the hierarchical nature of these rules. As a consequence, when …

Application of STIG Baseline to VMware Photon

There has been a lot of great work done to generate STIG baselines for the various VMware products. This content is publicly-available on Github under the vmware/dod-compliance-and-automation repository. As I’m currently focused on using VMware Photon 5, I’m going to explore that process with you now. Initial Testing Before applying your STIG, you’ll probably want …

Fluentd, Logs, and Timestamp Parsing

I’m pretty inexperienced when it comes to Fluentd logging, but I have a necessary use case to use it to ingest some log files with a non-standard format. There’s documentation on how parsers work, and there are even examples of how it should automatically happen. But, then there’s also the reality that I discovered that …

Different Logging Approaches

There are many common approaches to logging. However, since my home environment is running SecurityOnion (SO), I’m going to focus on three common ones and show how to do an end-to-end configuration with SO. If you’re curious about Filebeat, I’ve already written about it here. Fluentd Fluentd is extremely popular, while providing many options and …

MFA Tutorial – Yubikey Usage for both Console and SSH

For a while now I’ve been curious about the application of multi-factor authentication for Linux console and SSH access. It’s a particularly challenging use-case, especially if you operate in an air-gapped configuration, and yet need to meet industry standards such as PCI’s Control 8.5.1, or NIST 800-53’s Control IA-2(1). Multi-factor is essentially a requirement to …

Ingesting External Logs via Security Onion’s Elasticsearch

So, you’ve got Security Onion (SO) running from the Security-Appliance-in-a-Box via Ansible. Now what? How do you begin to ingest logs from your other devices into the included Elastic instance? I’m glad you asked! There’s a couple steps you’ll need to follow. Allow Access First you’re going to need to open the firewall to allow …

Security Onion – IP Routed Error on Install

On my first attempt to install Security Onion in my Security-Appliance-in-a-Box, I ran into a weird networking issue. The install script failed with the error “The IP being routed by Linux is not the IP address assigned to the management interface (ens1)“. Looking around online, I discovered that I’m not the first person to experience …