Wazuh is a free and open source platform used for threat prevention, detection, and response. It is capable of protecting workloads across on-premises, virtualized, containerized, and cloud-based environments.
Wazuh solution consists of an endpoint security agent, deployed to the monitored systems, and a management server, which collects and analyzes data gathered by the agents. Besides, Wazuh has been fully integrated with the Elastic Stack, providing a search engine and data visualization tool that allows users to navigate through their security alerts.
Wazuh Capabilities
A brief presentation of some of the more common use cases of the Wazuh solution.
Intrusion detection
Wazuh agents scan the monitored systems looking for malware, rootkits and suspicious anomalies. They can detect hidden files, cloaked processes or unregistered network listeners, as well as inconsistencies in system call responses.
In addition to agent capabilities, the server component uses a signature-based approach to intrusion detection, using its regular expression engine to analyze collected log data and look for indicators of compromise.
Log data analysis
Wazuh agents read operating system and application logs, and securely forward them to a central manager for rule-based analysis and storage. When no agent is deployed, the server can also receive data via syslog from network devices or applications.
The Wazuh rules help make you aware of application or system errors, misconfigurations, attempted and/or successful malicious activities, policy violations and a variety of other security and operational issues.
File integrity monitoring
Wazuh monitors the file system, identifying changes in content, permissions, ownership, and attributes of files that you need to keep an eye on. In addition, it natively identifies users and applications used to create or modify files.
File integrity monitoring capabilities can be used in combination with threat intelligence to identify threats or compromised hosts. In addition, several regulatory compliance standards, such as PCI DSS, require it.
Vulnerability detection
Wazuh agents pull software inventory data and send this information to the server, where it is correlated with continuously updated CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure) databases, in order to identify well-known vulnerable software.
Automated vulnerability assessment helps you find the weak spots in your critical assets and take corrective action before attackers exploit them to sabotage your business or steal confidential data.
Configuration assessment
Wazuh monitors system and application configuration settings to ensure they are compliant with your security policies, standards and/or hardening guides. Agents perform periodic scans to detect applications that are known to be vulnerable, unpatched, or insecurely configured.
Additionally, configuration checks can be customized, tailoring them to properly align with your organization. Alerts include recommendations for better configuration, references and mapping with regulatory compliance.
Incident response
Wazuh provides out-of-the-box active responses to perform various countermeasures to address active threats, such as blocking access to a system from the threat source when certain criteria are met.
In addition, Wazuh can be used to remotely run commands or system queries, identifying indicators of compromise (IOCs) and helping perform other live forensics or incident response tasks.
Regulatory compliance
Wazuh provides some of the necessary security controls to become compliant with industry standards and regulations. These features, combined with its scalability and multi-platform support help organizations meet technical compliance requirements.
Wazuh is widely used by payment processing companies and financial institutions to meet PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) requirements. Its web user interface provides reports and dashboards that can help with this and other regulations (e.g. GPG13 or GDPR).
Cloud security
Wazuh helps monitoring cloud infrastructure at an API level, using integration modules that are able to pull security data from well known cloud providers, such as Amazon AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. In addition, Wazuh provides rules to assess the configuration of your cloud environment, easily spotting weaknesses.
In addition, Wazuh light-weight and multi-platform agents are commonly used to monitor cloud environments at the instance level.
Containers security
Wazuh provides security visibility into your Docker hosts and containers, monitoring their behavior and detecting threats, vulnerabilities and anomalies. The Wazuh agent has native integration with the Docker engine allowing users to monitor images, volumes, network settings, and running containers.
Wazuh continuously collects and analyzes detailed runtime information. For example, alerting for containers running in privileged mode, vulnerable applications, a shell running in a container, changes to persistent volumes or images, and other possible threats.
Documentation
Adding the Wazuh repository
- Install the necessary packages for the installation:
apt install curl apt-transport-https unzip wget libcap2-bin software-properties-common lsb-release gnupg2- Install the GPG key:
curl -s https://packages.wazuh.com/key/GPG-KEY-WAZUH | apt-key add -- Add the repository:
echo "deb https://packages.wazuh.com/4.x/apt/ stable main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wazuh.list- Update the package information:
apt-get updateInstalling the Wazuh manager
- Install the Wazuh manager package:
apt-get install wazuh-manager- Enable and start the Wazuh manager service:
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable wazuh-manager
systemctl start wazuh-manager- Run the following command to check if the Wazuh manager is active:
systemctl status wazuh-managerWUI
The Wazuh WUI provides a powerful user interface for data visualization and analysis. This interface can also be used to manage Wazuh configuration and to monitor its status.
Security events
Integrity monitoring
Vulnerability detection
Regulatory compliance
Agents overview
Agent summary
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Wazuh – The Open Source Security Platform