During Black Hat 2023 in Las Vegas, our Corelight team worked effectively and speedily with our first-rate Black Hat NOC partners Arista, Cisco, Lumen, NetWitness and Palo Alto Networks. I was fortunate enough to be a member of the NOC team at the show, helping to defend the Black Hat network. In this blog, I’ll share my experience within the Network Operations Center (NOC) as well as an incident that we detected, investigated, triaged, and closed using Corelight’s Open NDR Platform.

When Eric M. Hutchins, Michael J. Cloppert, and Rohan M. Amin published their paper “Intelligence-Driven Computer Network Defense Informed by Analysis of Adversary Campaigns and Intrusion Kill Chains” in late 2010, they changed the way security personnel thought about defending their digital assets. The paper continues to be a useful model for defense today. This article proposes ways that modern network-derived evidence applies to the kill chain.

As a principal security researcher on Corelight’s Labs team, I help to solve difficult network security research problems at scale. Corelight’s customers might recognize some of my work if you see the packages “VPN Insights” or “App ID” on your sensors. Outside of my day-to-day role, I have a hobby podcast called eCrimeBytes where we lightheartedly discuss an electronic crime case each week.

As promised, we wanted to dedicate a blog to detections and findings from the network operations center (NOC) at Black Hat Asia 2023 as a follow up to our Lessons Learned blog. Some of these discoveries may not surprise the seasoned analyst or senior threat hunter – but will hopefully provide a little entertainment, because the more things change, the more they stay the same.

While there have been many intrusions, compromises, breaches, and incidents that have made news in the IT and InfoSec industries throughout 2022 and into this year, when events or threats like Storm-0558 gain coverage by mainstream media, we often get questions about Corelight’s ability to detect threats through our sensors, products & platform.

Trust is hard to earn but necessary for any successful relationship. As organizations build the systems to support Zero Trust, they find themselves balancing security and functionality across their operations. Incident Response and Network Operations in particular can be full of traumatic experiences, and as we sink into those moments the typical responses are freeze, flight, or fight.

In terms of unencrypted traffic, several highly used protocols lend themselves to logging and can significantly reduce the burden of packet capture without lowering the fidelity of information or the capabilities of analysts.

Increasingly, security teams are tasked with identifying, understanding, and managing risk around devices that may live outside the traditional IT umbrella. Operational Technology (OT) refers to computing systems that are used to manage and process operational functions as opposed to administrative operations, with Industrial Control Systems (ICS) being a major segment of that OT sector.