4.2. Baselining

All events that have not been assigned to a particular case are displayed in the Baselining section of the Analysis Cockpit.

Again, the Baselining Section is split into the different sources of our events. Additionally, you can see the Suggested Cases, which will suggest cases based on predefined Case Templates.

THOR Events
Aurora Events
Log Watcher Events (deprecated)
Suggested Cases

Logs that represent the same type of anomaly or incident can be grouped together using the various filters and then be stored in a Case for further analysis. Grouping can be done manually by filtering and clicking Create Case, selecting individual Events and clicking Create Case, or automatically by simply clicking the Advanced Tools button and Auto Baselining. With Auto Baselining, the Cockpit automatically calculates groups of "similar" log lines.

Once stored in a case, the logs will disappear from the Baselining section.

The Analysis Cockpit can automatically check for events that can be added to existing cases. By clicking the Optimize button, the Analysis Cockpit will iterate through all unassigned events and check if there is a matching case.

Note

The optimization will iterate through all unassigned events and assign them to cases if a match were found. This may take a while.

In an ideal organization, the Baselining section should always be empty at the end of a day, as these logs represent suspicious elements that have not yet been looked at.

4.2.1. Baselining Views

In the Baselining section there are two main views, the Compromise Assessment Mode and the Deep Inspection Mode. Additionally, you can find the Custom Signatures Only Mode, which will only show events found by custom signatures. This can be helpful if you scanned your environment with customer signatures, for example during or after an incident.

By default, the Analysis Cockpit Baselining Mode is set to Compromise Assessment.

4.2.2. Compromise Assessment Mode

The Compromise Assessment Mode is a new filter/representation of events created and reviewed by our security experts.

It includes our most successful detections. In this context "success" means, that the detection uncovered malicious activity in the wild and at the same time had a low anomaly and false positive rate. Additionally we also consider a detection to be successful that caused little or no false positives or anomalies.

The new view will combine and apply different techniques and filters to all the unclassified events in the Baselining section, providing a reduced set of logs which proved to be relevant from an analyst perspective.

This new "Compromise Assessment Mode" dramatically reduces your baselining effort. In our tests we noticed a decrease of events in the Baselining section of more than 90%. We believe that especially entities that follow our "Continuous Compromise Assessment" approach should switch into this new mode. We've also challenged the new mode with the post exploitation tools and techniques found in the context of HAFNIUM / Exchange exploitations in March 2021 and covered almost every aspect of the attacks in the new view.

Note

In case of an Incident Response, the Deep Inspection Mode is always recommended, since nothing is filtered here.

4.2.3. Deep Inspection Mode

This view is basically how it used to be (the old default view). It shows all Alerts and Warnings unless they are already part of an existing case.

4.2.4. Custom Signatures Only Mode

The Custom Signatures Only view will only show you events, which:

Are not part of a case
Where found by a custom signature

This view can be helpful if you only want to see events found by one of your custom signatures during a THOR scan. This can be helpful if you want to see only those events and nothing else.