Published By - Kelsey Taylor

SIEM (Security information and event management) is a software solution that combines SIM and SEM into one security management system.

The fundamental function of SIEM is to collect, store, and analyze the data from multiple systems and identify the deviations or potential cyber-attacks and take actions on it.

Top 10 Open Source SIEM Tools

SIEMonster

It is the most popular open-source technology which is available for free and as a paid source. It comes with customized security software which is beneficial for all types of organizations. It combines multiple open source solutions together in one centralized platform and provides real-time threat intelligence to protect against real-time attacks and allows them to run on the cloud.

Features:

Human-Based Behavior: SIEMonster along with ResponSight’s behavioral analytics is able to determine any deviations in the way any user interacts with his/her system which could lead to some sort of cyber risk.

Threat Intelligence: Palo Alto MineMeld, one of the SIEMonster tools, basically collects filters from various intelligence feeds. This can then be used to filter out malicious domains.

Deep Learning: This is probably one of the most crucial features of SIEMonster, wherein it is able to easily absorb any data and then draw parallels with other past events and data to look out for any discrepancies.

OSSEC

OSSEC (Open Source HIDS SECurity) works with various operating systems like Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, and Solaris.

It can perform log analysis, log integrity, Windows registry monitoring, time-based alerting, and rootkit detection. It analyzes logs from other open-source network services like web, firewall, DNS, FTP, mail, and database.

Besides being an open-source tool OSSEC can be customized completely to suit your needs. You can make changes to its script to alter its alert rules.

Snort

It is an open-source technology that is offered by Cisco. It monitors real-time traffic, inspects each packet closely, and detects a variety of attracts or suspicious anomalies like CGI attack, buffer overflows, SMB probes, and many more.

Snort has 3 main modes sniffer, packet logger, and network intrusion detection. In sniffer mode, the program displays real-time network packets to a console.

In packet logger mode, it dumps packets to the disk. In network intrusion detection mode, it monitors network traffic and performs analysis against predefined rules.

Snort has released its latest version 2.9.13.0 which has new updates as it reloads on snort rule, you can add a packet to the blacklist.

And new version comes with few improvements as well like it modifies the calculation of file hash and fixed portal authentication stuck in half-closed state.

Snort can be availed in 3 subscription plans i.e. Personal, Business, and Integrators.

Personal: This plan costs up to $29.99/year per user and is mostly used for a home network or educational purposes.

Business: This subscription plan costs up to $399/year and as the name suggests is mostly used at organizational levels but this plan doesn’t allow the license to be redistributed.



Integrator: This plan basically allows Snort to be integrated into your application.

The ELK Stack

The Elastic Stack is the most popular open-source tool today. It is a part of architecture for OSSEC Apache Metron, SIEMonster, and Wazuh.

It consists of multiple free SIEM products Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana and Beats.

Elasticsearch is the second most downloaded open-source software after the Linux Kernel. It basically does the job of data indexing and storage and uses a queuing mechanism so that connections between data is maintained.

Logstash provides a log record, as it collects a log data and then filter, process and enhance the data and enables custom plug-ins.

Kibana provides visualization and extremely powerful in that and it allows users to break down the data in a way they like.

Beats are simple and fast log shippers and collectors data. It is a light weighted log that can be used on edge hosts to track different types of data.

OSSIM

It consists of some SIEM components like processing, event collection, and normalization.

It includes both long-term threat assessment, as well as short-term logging besides monitoring, data collection, and analyzing the data.

Features:

Asset Management: It maintains a track of activities and network assets while discovering new assets that access the network

Log Management: it stores the data at a safe place for further reference.

Threat Intelligence: it stores the data related to threats and give solutions to resolve the problem.

Sagan

Sagan works likes snort and it supports snort rules. Sagan is a real-time, multi-threaded, and event log monitoring system, it is built to prevent blocking.

Features:

It is meant to be easy to install.

Can be used to monitor any type of system or a device like firewalls, IDS/IPS systems, Windows event logs, and many more.

Its memory resources and CPU are lightweight.

Prelude

It is similar to OSSIM, prelude accepts data and events from different sources, and stores them in a single location by using IDMEF.

It provides collecting, filtering, analyzing, and visualizing capabilities. Due to steady development, it is updated with the latest threat intelligence.

Its third party agents are as follows:

OSSEC

Snort

Auditd

Suricata

Ufwi-filtered

Features:

Pilot: Prelude SIEM gives and easily operated data for better control for the security information system.

Detect: It will detect any hacking attempt in the security system by combining various detection technologies.

React: It handles any intrusion of the security system and provides with the recovery act from it.

Wazuh

Wazuh evolved from OSSEC, but now it has its own unique solutions. It performs Windows registry monitoring, time-based alerting, log analysis, and rootkit detection.

It helps in getting security visibility by monitoring the host at an operating system.it monitors and gives an immediate response to advanced threats.

It helps in blocking the network attack or stop a malicious process.

Features:

File integrity monitoring: it monitors the logs and files, identify the changes and attributes the files.

Log management and analysis: it reads the logs and operating system and forwards to a central manager and analysis and storage.

Intrusion and anomaly detection: it can detect the hidden files or unregistered network listeners and inconsistencies in the system for responses.

MozDef

The Mozilla Defense Platform (MozDef) is a set of micro-services that can be used on the top of Elasticsearch.

MozDef is used for investigating suspicious activities, handle security incidents, alert on security issues, and to categorize threats.

It detects any security incident and manages the process while smoothing the real-time activities handling the process.

Features:

Act as an interface for systems like cloud protections, firewalls, and other API based setups.

Provide real-time association between incident handlers

Provide repetitive, foreseeable processes for incident management.

Automating the process of Incident management, response, and metrics automation and information sharing by going beyond the traditional SIEM systems.

Apache Metron

It provides an advanced security framework that is built with the Hadoop community. It also enables to check the massive amount of data for any anomalies.

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