Hey, there. This is part five of the Elastic SIEM for home and small business blog series. If you haven’t read the first, second, and third blogs, you may want to before going any further. In the Getting started blog, we created our Elasticsearch Service deployment and started collecting data from one of our computers using Winlogbeat. In the Securing cluster access blog, we secured access to our cluster by restricting privileges for users and Beats.

In the previous post, we covered some of the frameworks accessible by kernel extensions that provide information about file system, process, and network events. These frameworks included the Mandatory Access Control Framework, the KAuth framework, and the IP/socket filter frameworks. In this post, we will go into the various tips and tricks that can be used in order to obtain even more information regarding system events.

This year at BSidesDFW, my local security conference, I highlighted a continuing trend of adversaries using open source offensive tools. The talk reviewed one of these post-exploitation frameworks named Koadic and walked through different ways defenders can build behavioral detections through the use of Event Query Language (EQL).

When it comes to having visibility and detecting threats on macOS, one of the best sources of information for file system events, process events, and network events is the kernel. MacOS kernel extensions provide the ability to receive data about these events in real time with great detail. This is good for providing quick visibility into detecting anomalies and identifying possible threats.