While we released TheHive as a free, open source product in November 2016, it must not be chalked off quickly as a young, immature solution.
v1.0.0 was put into production in our environment in October 2014. Yes, October 2014. And we’ve been using it every day and refining it since then. Once we deemed it good enough, we decided to share it with the community under an AGPL license to help incident responders in their mission.
Make no mistake. TheHive is a field-tested, mature Security Incident Response Platform (SIRP) built by people who are passionate about Digital Forensics and Incident Response.
A few months after the first public release (v 2.9.0), we adopted bee-related codenames for new major versions and published Buckfast (v 2.10.0).Cortex, the analysis engine that allowed TheHive to analyze and assess observables at scale was shipped as a separate product. Buckfast can interface with one or several Cortex instances depending on your performance and OPSEC needs. For example, you may want to install a separate Cortex on your investigation, air-gapped network to interact with your sandbox as you don’t want to be firing those malicious samples on your corporate network.
Buckfast can also create cases out of MISP events. You can configure it to import them from a single or many MISP instances. And to prepare for the next major version, Mellifera, due in early May 2017, we have released TheHive4py, a Python API client for TheHive.
TheHive4py will be improved to fully support Mellifera’s alerting framework. To put it simply, Mellifera will not only let you preview MISP events and import them but also receive SIEM alerts, email incident reports and different other types of alerts depending on your environment thanks to TheHive4py. And if an analyst discards an alert by mistake in Mellifera’s notification area, they can go back to a ‘trash bin’ and fix their error. Mellifera will also allow you to export cases as MISP events to share IOCs with other teams.
Now lets’ get back to TheHive’s perfect companion: Cortex. As of this writing, Cortex features 13 analyzers. These analyzers can perform one type of analysis (such as Abuse Finder) or several (such as DomainTools which can do 6). In the very near future, we plan to add at least 10 more analyzers which are shown in the boxes with dotted borders in the picture above. All upcoming analyzers are contributed by our user community whom we wholeheartedly thank. One of the analyzers will allow you to check observables from TheHive against a MISP instance to search for events that may contain them.
We have also begun work on a Python API client for Cortex dubbed… Cortex4py (how creative wink wink). This will allow people who are not using TheHive to summon the power of Cortex from their SIRP, scripts or any other DFIR tool that can import or interact with Python code.
So in the few months since our project was born to the Internet, we have released a solid collaborative SIRP, a simple yet powerful analysis engine to analyze observables and aid teams in their investigations as well as a Python API client for our SIRP. We also have rather ambitious plans to make them even much more useful.
Oh and one more thing! We have released another piece of software around the same time as the first version of TheHive and on which we haven’t said much so far: Hippocampe. Hippocampe can regularly download feeds and exposes a REST API to let you query them from Cortex (or from other tools). You submit an observable and it’ll tell you if it appears in one or several feeds along with a score. The score takes into account the trust you put in the feed sources (which can be adjusted over time) and the number of sources which contain the observable. We’ll cover Hippocampe in more details in an upcoming post.
Before you run away from us
Before you’re lost between the notes
The beat goes round and round
Jigsaw is falling into place
So there is nothing to explain
TheHive Project 