5. Basic Concepts

5.1. Section Events and Baselining

All events that have been stored by Analysis Cockpit – regardless whether they have been assigned a particular case or not – are displayed in the section Events. This section can be regarded to be your hunting pool. The section provides powerful filtering options.

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

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 click Create Case or automatically simply by clicking Automatically generate Cases in the Auto Baselining section. With Automatically generate Cases, the Cockpit automatically calculates groups of "similar" log lines. Once stored in a case, these logs will disappear from the Baselining section.

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.

Details on using the Baselining section can be found below.

5.2. Baselining Views

In the Baselining section there are two views, the Compromise Assessment Mode and the Deep Inspection Mode.

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

Select your view - "Compromise Assessment Mode" or "Deep Inspection Mode"

5.2.1. Compromise Assessment Mode

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

5.2.2. 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.

5.3. Log Processing and Cases

The Cases section gives a good overview regarding the existing cases and also provides various filtering options. Column visibility can be configured by clicking on the Columns button of this section.

When a case is created, the state will be "Open" and the type will be set to "Noteworthy" by default.

The following states can be set (by default):

Open
Level 1 Finished
Level 1 Working
Level 2 Working
Closed

It is possible to configure custom states.

The following types can be set:

Incident
Suspicious
Vulnerability
Noteworthy
Unknown
Legitimate Anomaly
False Positive

See chapter Glossary for a detailed description of these terms.

Within a case, it is possible to add various information, write a summary, provide canned recommendations or add assessment information.

The log lines contained in the case can of course be analyzed in detail and changes to the case are tracked automatically.

The cockpit will automatically calculate rules (auto_case_id), that make sure, future incoming logs that are similar to the log lines in this particular case are automatically assigned to this case and WILL NOT SHOW UP in the Baselining section if this is chosen for this case.

In order to understand this better, let's assume you have decided, a group of logs are legitimate anomalies. Then all future logs that are similar to these anomalies will automatically be added to this case and not show up in the Baselining section.

In case you have decided a group of log lines represent a security incident the same things will happen. Future log lines that represent a security incident will show up only in the case and not in the Baselining section.

Most organizations obviously want to be alerted in case of a security incident. So, the Cockpit can be configured to forward all logs that are automatically assigned to an incident case to the organizations' SIEM System via syslog. Organizations that prefer to handle THOR Events entirely within the Analysis Cockpit and not forward anything to a SIEM system may choose to configure a notification that shows up in the COCKPIT’s Notification Section.

The following picture shows the recommended log processing.

As one can see, an incoming log line only shows up in the Baselining section when it matches no existing case.

This behavior is highly configurable and can be changed in the Settings section of the Analysis Cockpit. One can even decide not to forward anything to a SIEM System or may decide to also forward suspicious elements in addition.

In other Words:

Cases represent the means of setting and maintaining the log baseline within the Cockpit. When you scan your infrastructure once, assign all logs to cases and then scan it for the second time, the Baselining section should be empty if nothing has changed. All incoming logs should be similar to the ones in the first scan and therefore be assigned to the respective cases and not show up in the Baselining section.

Working with cases is explained in detail in the sections below.

5.4. Understanding Users, Roles, Rights and Case Status

The rights and roles model within the cockpit is aimed to support large multinational organizations with different independent users working with the case management at the same time. An organization responsible for analyzing THOR logs might be split up in groups of analysts.

Within the cockpit, all users have the right to access the logs and create cases. Within the Case Management section, access rights are granted depending on the particular state the case is in.

In order to setup your rights management you must first decide about the states you want your cases to have, then assign rights for a particular state to a role and after that you add users to that particular role.

In order to understand this better, let's look at an example.

Let's assume we have an organization where a Level 1 analyst group located in Frankfurt is responsible for creating cases and providing an initial assessment for cases, while a Level 2 analyst group located in Hamburg is responsible for reviewing, final decision and closing of cases. In order to support an efficient workflow, you would at least need the following states for your cases:

Open (nobody is yet working on this case)
Level 1 Working (Level 1 is working on this case)
Level 1 Finished (Level 1 has finished and nobody is now working on this case)
Level 2 Working (Level 2 is working on this case)
Closed (Case closed)

A workflow could look like this:

For your convenience, we already did the setup for this example and ship all Analysis Cockpit with this workable template by default. You are free to use, modify or delete the corresponding rights, statuses and roles.

However, in order to explain the concepts and the setup of roles and statuses better we assume for a while, we had an empty cockpit with no roles and statuses pre-configured.

In order to set up our pre-configured example, we navigate to the Settings section and create the following roles:

Settings - adding additional roles — Settings – adding additional roles

Every role can have different rights. We will explain this in detail in the next section. Firstly, we create Level 1 Analyst and Level 2 Analyst without rights at all.

After that we define the following statuses:

Settings - Case Status — Settings – Case Status

In the lower table you can manage the access rights for every role and every Case Status. We can give the suitable rights to our generated roles by clicking the Add Role Case Status button on the right.

Edit Rights - Read, Write, Set — Edit Rights – Read, Write, Set

For Level 1 Analyst we add the right to read and write all "Open" cases and change the case status to this status (set).

Additionally, we grant Level 1 Analyst the rights to read, write and set all cases for "Level 1 Working".

Finally, we grant the right to read and set cases for the status Level1 Finished. This allows Level 1 Analysts to set a particular case to "Level 1 Finished" and restricts them from modifying this case once they have passed it to this status.

For Level 2 we now add the rights to read and write cases for "Level 1 Finished" and the rights to read, write and set cases for "Level 2 Working". This allows Level 2 analysts to pick cases from the "Level 1 Finished" status and start working on them.

As we do not want Level 2 Analysts to reopen cases, that have already been closed we only grant them rights to read and set for the status "Closed".

Additionally, we give Level 2 Analyst the right to set the case status to "Open".

After that, the Access rights for Case Status section looks like this:

Settings - Access rights for Case Status — Settings – Access rights for Case Status

Of course, this is only an example. You may of course decide to give Level 2 full access to all cases, and it may also be a good means of training to grant Level 1 Analysts the right to see the "Level 2 Working" and "Closed" cases. You may also want Level 2 Analysts to reopen "Closed" cases or may restrict this right to an additional role. This just illustrates, that the system is highly configurable with an almost infinite number of statuses, roles and rights.

Finally, you simply add users and add them to their particular role.