I spent a bunch of time with Security Onion the last couple week’s and have been lovin’ it! I ran the install, took all the defaults, ran the updates, and pretty much just let it burn in on my prod (home) environment.

After a few days, I went back to check the Security Onion dashboard to check the alerts. There was a bunch of benign stuff (computers pinging each other, Dropbox broadcasting to the network) but also a couple interesting finds – SO caught one of my VMs downloading (intentionally) Invoke-Mimikatz. The dashboard allows you to see transcripts of file downloads like this, as well as a tool called Network Miner to extract a copy of the downloaded file for further analysis.

One thing the SO didn’t pick up on was the DNS-based C2 tunnel I setup on a test victim client. However, it turns out RITA works great for exactly this type of analysis – it reported the huge number of DNS requests from my victim client to the C2 server. Very helpful info for an incident response situation!