Soon after we released Cortex-Analyzers 2.4.0, Jérôme noticed that something was definitely wrong. And that something was plural.
As he set to retest a few things here and there, he realised that many docker images, for the latest and greatest analyzers and responders, were not automatically built. The code factory wasn’t working 😰
So he started digging. And the more he dug, the more bugs he discovered. Our user community also reported a few issues. He thought it was about time he opens that bottle of Aloxe-Corton, put a Makaya McCraven album to play on his turntable, and rolls his sleeves to address all these problems headfirst 🍷
After a few hours of intense work, he managed to fix the docker build process and release Cortex-Analyzers 2.4.1, a hotfix that corrects the following issues:
[#545] Message extraction using FileInfo doesn’t always work
[#610] The VirusTotal analyzer contains a typo which prevents it from running
[#614] Many analyzers fail to run due to incorrect permissions
[#619] Abuse Finder not working with docker after force usage of python3
[#620] Missing library prevented the build of the docker image corresponding to the new MalwareClustering analyzer
Finally, he took the opportunity to rename Palo Alto AUTOFOCUS analyzers to Autofocus, for consistency purposes.
Please refer to our previous blog post, pertaining to Cortex-Analyzers 2.4.0, for update instructions.
Thank you in advance for your understanding and happy cyberfighting! 💪🏼
We have been speaking about it for almost two years. We have been making it for more than twelve months. And the day (or rather the month in this case) has almost come for TheHive 4, our latest and greatest version, to be unleashed.
While the first release candidate should be published by the end of this month, we would like to cover some of the most important changes we introduced in a platform which we rewrote almost from the ground up (40,000 lines of Scala code and counting), while keeping the familiar look&feel our longtime users came to expect.In a previous blog post, we covered TheHiveFS, a nifty feature of TheHive4 that allows you to quickly access all files stored in TheHive directly from your investigation machine. It’s time now to get a look under the hood of THeHive 4.
My Time is Precious. TL;DR Please
A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Here you go then!
The Hive 4’s Brand New Architecture
I am Puzzled, can you Elaborate a Bit?
So, you are not in a hurry anymore? Fine. Here, grab a seat, a glass of Gevrey-Chambertin and tasty Burgundy snails. All set? Let’s start then!
TheHive 4 will be the first version to use a graph database instead of Elasticsearch. Yes, you read that correctly. TheHive 4 won’t support Elasticsearch anymore but fear not fearless cyberdefender. Your friendly bees will not leave you hanging. If you are already using TheHive 3.4.x, we will provide a migration tool that will move your existing data to the new storage system (with no losses or bit flips hopefully).
We haven’t decided to ditch Elasticsearch on a whim or because Thomas (Franco, not Chopitea nor the General) dropped his leftist hipster attitude for a tight, tailor-made dictator uniform straight out of Spain. For all its greatness, ES has some annoying limitations which prevented us from adding, in an elegant, haiku-like way important features such as multi-tenancy, RBAC and large file management, while laying the ground for the future (stop being curious, the future has not been invented yet and when we do invent it, we’ll let you know).
Using JanusGraph, TheHive 4 structures information in graphs and stores them in an Apache Cassandra database. All the files that you attach to task logs or add as observables are stored in a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).
Thanks to this brand new architecture, TheHive 4 is horizontally scalable. You can add as many TheHive, Cassandra and HDFS nodes to your Security Incident Response Platform cluster and sustain whatever load you might be facing without a sweat. Who said FOSS can’t be ‘enterprise grade’ (whatever that means in marketing lingo)?
A Tour d’Horizon of the Main Features
TheHive 4, boosted by all the passion and skills of Zen Master Franco and MC Adouani, will support, in addition to TheHiveFS:
Multi-tenancy
RBAC
2FA
Web configuration
API versioning
We will cover some of these features in greater detail in future instalments. In the meantime, let’s take a ride in a helicopter and view the wonderful landscape laying before us from above. After you Messieurs-Dames, we are French gentlemen and gallantry is of the essence (except when we use the public transportation in Paris, then savages we become).
Multi-Tenancy
As in Cortex, you will be able to create multiple organisations within a single instance of TheHive 4. In addition, an organisation can decide to share a case or parts of it (say a task, some observables, etc.) with other organisations. That way, a peer organisation or a constituent can contribute to the investigation at hand, provide essential information, etc.
RBAC
TheHive 4 supports a large set of user permissions. Some pertain to administrators, others to users and there are also permissions that apply to connectors. For example, users can manage tasks but not observables. They can have the power to share a case or part of it with sister organisations and execute Cortex analyzers but not responders.
You will be able to create roles for users, and, at the organisational level, what we call shares. RBAC deserves its own blog post and we’ll get to it pretty soon.
2FA
Do you really want us to describe this one? Before you answer yes, we’d like to remind you that you are in a helicopter. Just sayin’.
‘They asked me to explain 2FA. So I helped them out of the helicopter. It was flying way above ground.’ Source: Berserk, FNAC.com
Web Configuration
Tired of using vi, Emacs or your favourite CLI editor for making configuration changes to TheHive’s application.conf? Tired of restarting the service to take into account those modifications? Then you will certainly go dance kizomba with Nabil all night long when we tell you that you don’t need to use vi & service (or whatever the kids are using these days) anymore!
Thanks to the new architecture, all the configuration will be stored in the underlying database and you will be able to edit it using the WebUI. TheHive will automatically take the changes into account and you won’t need to restart it.
We can feel your love here. Merci !
API Versioning
TheHive 4 adds API versioning and it will maintain backward compatibility with TheHive 3.4.x without preventing us from adding new features. TheHive4py will not be updated right away for TheHive 4 but thanks to the backward API compatibility, all existing feeders and programs that use the current version of TheHive4py will still work out of the box.
That’s all folks! Stay tuned for further news and, in the meantime, don’t be blue cuz’ the bees gonna take care of you.
TheHive Project’s Code Chefs, sweating under their toques, are working hard to deliver TheHive 4 as soon as feasible. The current target release date for the 1st release candidate (4.0-RC1) is Friday Feb 28, 2020.
While TheHive 4 will be the first release to support graph databases, multi-tenancy and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), it will also have a nifty feature that can simplify the incident response and digital forensics workflows of our fellow cyberdefenders: TheHiveFS.
What is TheHiveFS?
Starting from TheHive 4, TheHive can be ‘mounted’ as a remote, WebDAV filesystem. The filesystem can be securely mounted if SSL/TLS is enabled.
Thanks to TheHiveFS, you can quickly access all files stored in TheHive directly from your investigation machine. This can speed up the time needed to triage and analyse evidence.
What Types of Files Can I Access through TheHiveFS?
You can access, in read-only mode, all files attached to task logs and all observables which datatype is file, as long as you are allowed to do so. Indeed, TheHive 4 comes with RBAC so if, for example, you are not allowed to view a case or some file observables in a case, you won’t be able to access them using TheHiveFS, the same way as if you are using the WebUI.
Screenshot showing an analyst accessing file observables and files associated to tasks of case #40 using TheHiveFS
How Can I Mount TheHiveFS?
Assuming you have a WebDAV client, such as davfs2, use the following command line:
$ sudo mount -t davfs -o noexec https://myhiveinstance:9001/fs /mnt/dav/
You can also point your graphical file manager to:
dav(s)://myhiveinstance:9001/fs
You will need to authenticate using your username and password as if you were connecting to TheHive’s WebUI.
Mom, I’ve Just Stepped on a Landmine
Beware folks. When you download a file observable using TheHive’s WebUI, it will conveniently create a password-protected ZIP archive before handing you the file. This way, we avoid accidental double clicks that may lead to the infection and compromise of your workstation, which might reflect bad on you or force you to offer breakfast the next morning to all your fellow teammates.
There is no such protection if you use TheHiveFS. Let us repeat this so it sinks: there is no such protection if you use TheHiveFS.
If you mount TheHive’s filesystem and open by accident or by a great deal of will, as a true, hardcore fan of Russian roulette, a file observable that is in fact malware courtesy of your favourite bear, kitten, panda or eagle, you can’t blame your friendly bees. But we will empathise (and our empathy level is directly correlated to the amount of pains au chocolat you send our way).
You’ve been warned.
That Sounds Awesome! When Can I Try It?
As written above, you will be able to try TheHiveFS as soon as TheHive 4.0-RC1 is released and that’s currently planned for the end of February 2020.
You can cry, beg, try to bribe us with VC money, make the line at 3:00 AM in front of TheHive Store (there ain’t no such store, we are not Apple), this will not make us work any faster. But you can always cheer us up, hug us or just thank us. This means a lot to us and to the free, open source software flame we carry deep within our souls.
One More Thing…
While we aren’t Apple, we can mimic Steve to share one more information that will make TheHiveFS even more interesting by Q3-Q4 2020. We plan to add support for large file management in TheHive 4.1, the next major version after 4.0 as would Captain Obvious say. Thanks to this feature, you will be able to upload memory and disk images to TheHive and if your Internet line breaks, the upload will resume automatically.
Lo and behold, we aren’t dead & TheHive Project ain’t toast! So, foremost, Happy New Year folks (we are still in January, right?)! We have some nice gifts coming up for you, gifts that have required very heavy-duty work. Of course, you might complain that we haven’t been responsive as of late but hey, there’s only so much we can do, right?
Happy New Year Folks! (Photo by Saâd Kadhi)
We’ll talk about those gifts in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, there’s a new Cortex version in town and we urge you to upgrade to it, particularly if you consider deploying several Cortex nodes as a cluster. Indeed, Cortex 3.0.1 fixes a missing dependency that is required to set up such an architecture. Additionally (and this is the part where you should be paying attention), this version fixes the display of error messages pertaining to analyzer and responder operations, and also ensure that old responders and analyzers no longer show up once you clicked on that Refresh button.
Fixes and Enhancements
#244 Prevent the Play secret key from being displayed in the logs at startup. Nonetheless, you can still display it (for troubleshooting purposes or to make things easier for attackers that might have access to the logs and be interested in such a world-changing secret) by using the --show-secret option when starting Cortex
#243 fixes the display of error messages when analyzers & responders fail
#240 An encoding issue causes an invalid format in the catalog file
#230 Elastic4play has dropped the ES cluster configuration option. Contributed by Adeel Ahmad
#164 Handle second/minute-rates limits on Flavors and Analyzers
Running Into Trouble?
Shall you encounter any difficulty during the upgrade process, please ask on our user forum, get in touch with the community on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org.
One of the big improvements you’ll notice in Cortex 3 is the support for dockerized analyzers. And amongst some of their benefits, the installation process has been significantly simplified. So let’s assume you do not want to bang your head against Python, or other library dependencies. Then read one for a way to set up analyzers and run them quickly.
The following instructions have been tested on Ubuntu 18.04. If you already have a Cortex instance up and running, you can jump directly to the docker installation section below.
Install System Packages
Prerequisites
Ensure your system contains the required packages:
Start by giving the cortex account the permission to run Docker.
usermod -a -G docker cortex
Next, in the Cortex configuration file (/etc/cortex/application.conf) ensure jobs will be executed using Docker:
job { runner = [docker] }
Follow the Standard Analyzer Catalog
If you are a complete Cortex noob, please read the QuickStart Guide.
Configure Cortex to get the catalog with up-to-date versions of analyzers. Edit /etc/cortex/application.conf to set the catalog URLs in the analyzer configuration section as shown below:
Once Cortex is configured, restart the service with the following command, wait a few seconds and you should be able to connect to Cortex on https://<cortex_host>:9001 et voilà!
sudo service restart cortex
Important Note: The catalog analyzers.json contains information regarding versions of analyzers we consider stable and that are updated with bug fixes. This is typically synchronised with our master branch on Github. When you are using this catalog, you are de facto benefiting from the latest analyzer updates without needing to refresh anything in Cortex or setup again the configuration to get the latest version.
We also provide two additional catalogs:
analyzers-stable.json which strictly follows versions of analyzers if you do not want any uncontrolled updates. What does that mean in practice? You will have to click on the Refresh button in Cortex to update your analyzers, disable old ones and enable new versions. Moreover, you will also have to setup again their configuration. Typically, if you installed and setup Cortex with this catalog and the current version of FileInfo analyzers is 6.0, you won’t benefit from the next version, let’s say 6.1, unless you refresh Cortex.
analyzers-devel.jsonwhich contains information about new analyzers or version of analyzers that contains code that has been reviewed but not tested enough (or even not tested at all at times) to be deemed ready for production environments. This is typically synchronized with the develop branch of our Github repository.
Same goes for responders. All available catalogs for Cortex are published on bintray so you can choose the one that better fits your needs (or your risk/gambling profile :p).
For many months, we have been concentrating our efforts on TheHive 4, the next major version of your favourite Security Incident Response Platform, which we’ll finally provide RBAC (or multi-tenancy if you prefer), a feature that Cortex had for quite some time now.
As you well know, both TheHive and Cortex rely on Elasticsearch (ES) for storage. The choice of ES made sense in the beginning of the project but as we added additional features and had new ideas to give you the best experience possible, we faced several ES quirks and shortcomings that proved challenging if not outright blocking for making our roadmap a reality, including RBAC implementation in TheHive, a far more complex endeavour than RBAC in Cortex. Transitioning from ES to graph databases was necessary and since we want our existing users to have a smooth migration path, TheHive 4 (the first release candidate should come out of the oven by the end of the year) will support both ES and graph databases.
But while we were focusing on that, we completely lost sight of the end of life of ES 5.6 so we wrote an apology to you, our dear users, back in May.
Shortly after, we released TheHive 3.4.0-RC1, to add support for ES 6 (with all the breaking changes it has introduced). We also did the same for Cortex with the release of Cortex 3.0.0-RC3. We also took that opportunity to clear out some AngularJS technodebt we had.
We then asked you to take them for a spin and report back any bugs you find given that both versions had to support ES 5.6 and ES 6 to allow for proper migration.
After a few rounds of release candidates, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of TheHive 3.4.0 and Cortex 3.0.0 as stable releases.
You should also note that, in addition to ES 6 support, Cortex 3.0.0 supports fully dockerised analyzers and responders. We’ll elaborate on this in a future blog post soon.
Changelogs
If you are interested in some nitty-gritty details, we invite you to read the relevant changelogs since our last post on the subject:
Shall you encounter any difficulty, please join our user forum, contact us on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org. We will be more than happy to help as usual!
If that sounds still complicated, worry not! We also wrote a little program that helps you prepare the environment and install everything. We ensured that it works well on Ubuntu 18.04. The program uses two environment variables to set up everything: FEEDERS_SYSACCOUNT and FEEDERS_HOMEDIR :
There are also sane, default settings in case you did not set any value. DigitalShadows2TH’s home directory will be set to /opt/thehive_feeders/DigitalShadows2TH. To use the script, run the following command line and follow the instructions:
Previous versions of DigitalShadows2TH allowed only one case template to be associated with alerts created by the feeder in TheHive. Starting from DigitalShadows2TH 2.4.0, you can define a case template for each type of incidents raised by DigitalShadows in the configuration file.
The configuration pertaining to TheHive looks as follows:
A template can be defined for all the following DigitalShadows incident types:
DATA_LEAKAGE
CYBER_THREAT
PHYSICAL_SECURITY
SOCIAL_MEDIA_COMPLIANCE
BRAND_PROTECTION
INFRASTRUCTURE
A default template can be defined for DigitalShadows incidents. If no template is found for a specific incident type, the feeder looks for the default template. if no default template is found, an empty case will be created by when importing the alert.
Update or Install
If you are not using docker, just pull the repository and update your configuration file with the new templates part for TheHive.
Update your Repository
$ cd /opt/TheHive_feeders/DigitalShadows2TH/
$ git pull
The configuration file has changed, so you need to update yours before running the program. A new templates section has been added for TheHive and the path has changed. It is now in the config/ directory of the project.
Install and Use via the Code Repository
$ cd /opt/TheHive_feeders
$ git clone https://github.com/TheHive-Project/DigitalShadows2TH.git
After that, follow the prerequisites and edit the configuration file. In /opt/TheHive_feeders/DigitalShadows2TH/config/ copy config.py.template to config.py and modify it.
Use cases and detailed configuration instructions can be found in the README file in the repository.
Running Into Trouble?
Shall you encounter any difficulty, please join our user forum, contact us on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org. We will be more than happy to help!
We could not duly test DNSSinkhole since we do not have access to the associated service. So we would really appreciate it if you could test it and let us know whether it works or not.
This analyzer lets you check if an IP address has been registered in your DNS sinkhole. TheHive displays the analyzer results as follows:
DNSSinkhole analyzer: long report
DNSSinkhole analyzer: short report
TalosReputation
This analyzer lets you determine whether an IP address has been reported as a threat on Cisco Talos Intelligence service. No special access to the service is required to run the analyzer.
TheHive displays the analyzer results as follows:
Talos Reputation: long report
Talos Reputation analyzer : short report
Crt.sh
This analyzer has been enriched to display SHA-1 fingerprints. The long report format has been updated to reflect this new information.
Crt.sh analyzer: long report
FileInfo
FileInfo has been updated and is now able to parse PDF files and extract IOCs such as URLs, hosts, domains, IPs, hashes and many more.The analyzer does also support the last version of the extract-msg library.
FileInfo analyzer: IOC Parser long report
FileInfo analyzer: IOC Parser short report
VirusTotal and Python3
The VirusTotal analyzer, including all its flavours, now uses Python3 and an updated virustotal-api library.
Yeti API key
An optional API key can now be configured and used by the Yeti analyzer.
Malwares_GetReport
A hash computation has been fixed in this analyzer.
EMLParser
A first fix has been introduced to avoid this analyzer to crash when there is no content-description in content_header, and a second has been added to correct a header display issue.
IBM XForce Lookup
The analyzer has been improved to allow users to add a trailing / at the end of the API URL without breaking everything.
Updating your Analyzers in Cortex 2.x
Each analyzer and responder comes with its own, pip compatible requirements.txt file. Run the following commands to update your Cortex analyzers to the latest version:
cd path/to/Cortex-Analyzers git pull for I in analyzers/*/requirements.txt; do sudo -H pip2 install -U -r $I || true; done && \ for I in analyzers/*/requirements.txt; do sudo -H pip3 install -U -r $I || true; done for I in responders/*/requirements.txt; do sudo -H pip3 install -U -r $I || true; done
Once done, do not forget to login to Cortex as an orgadmin and click on the Refresh Analyzers button. Refer to the online Cortex documentation for further details.
If you want to use dockerised analyzers and responders, ensure that the URL of the catalog.json file corresponding to the Cortex-Analyzers repository is registered inapplication.conf. Please note that this won’t work if you are tracking the stable catalog.
After doing so, do not forget to login to Cortex as an orgadmin, click on the Refresh Analyzers button, then Disable and Enable again each analyzer and responder. Analyzer (and responder) updates should occur automatically as long as docker.autoUpdate is set to true in application.conf (this is the default setting).
Update TheHive Report Templates
If you are using TheHive, you must import the new report templates in your instance as follows:
click on Import templates button and select the downloaded package
Running Into Trouble?
Shall you encounter any difficulty, please join our user forum, contact us on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org. We will be more than happy to help!
As we announced on May 14, 2019, we have been working very hard to add Elasticsearch 6 support to TheHive and Cortex as Elasticsearch 5.x went the way of the dodo when Elastic plugged life support off this venerable version. We also took this occasion to upgrade AngularJS and its sub projects to 1.7.8, the latest 1.x version as of this writing. Additionally, Grunt build dependencies have also been updated to their latest compatible versions.
It took us more time than initially foreseen but hey, we all love deadlines. We all love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
TheHive 3.4.0-RC1 and Cortex 3.0.0-RC3 are now available on every Internet pipe near you and before you take them for a spin to help us identify any issues to make the stable releases rock-solid, let us walk you through some important information. Relax and grab a drink (and send good wine our way, we can always use some!).
In addition to ES5 and 6 support and the update of AngularJS, this version corrects a few bugs that were identified in the latest stable version (3.3.1) and adds a few features. The most important one in our opinion is the ability to import a file from a Cortex report. This requires Cortex 3.0.0-RC3. The full list of changes is available at the following location.
ES5 and ES6 support, AngularJS et cetera et cetera. Well you know the song right? Not quite as Cortex 3.0.0 significantly facilitates analyzer and responder installation and updates, thanks to Docker as we touched upon in a blog post earlier this year.
As detailed in the Cortex migration guide, which we recommend you read thoroughly, you can migrate from Cortex 2 and keep using analyzers and responders the same way (using processes), use the new Docker-based analyzers and responders or mix and match between running processes and docker containers (but then, you gotta pay extra attention to configure properly which analyzer/responder runs in which fashion).
Moreover, if you use the new dockerised analyzers and responders, you will be able to choose if you want to have them autoupdated (that’s the default behaviour) and if so, pick the bleeding edge, potentially buggy versions, the minor releases or, if you are risk-averse, stick with stable ones.
Cortex 3.0.0-RC3 also adds the ability to retrieve files resulting from analyzer jobs and last but not least, corrects an information disclosure bug that allowed non-admin users to retrieve the details of other users through the API. The vulnerability was reported by Adam Maris so kudos to him!
Warning: Regressions Ahead!
As outlined in our previous post about these new versions:
TheHive 3.4.0-RC1 and Cortex 3.0.0-RC3 use HTTP transport (9200/tcp by default) to connect to Elasticsearch instead of its native binary protocol (9300/tcp by default).
SSL/TLS, including when using a client certificate, can be configured to connect securely to ES. However this has not been tested yet.
Support of X-Pack and Search Guard is discontinued for anything but basic and SSL client authentication, which would still work.
Caution: Performance May Take a Hit!
The parent-child relationships we use behind the scene in Elasticsearch could make queries significantly slower with ES 6 and in our limited testing, we had the impression that performance took a hit. So please be cautious there and we’d be grateful if you could report any sluggishness you notice during your tests of the new versions with ES6.
On Tuesday May 21, 2019, it came back to bite us like a dead that doesn’t die when Adam Mariš reported it was still possible to do a privilege escalation in all versions of TheHive, including version 3.3.0.
After analysis, we found that THP-SEC-ADV-2017-001 did not address the full scope of the vulnerability. Adam hit the nail on the head – be like Adam! 👏
We have released a hotfix for the last version of TheHive which completely puts the dead to rest once and for all and we sincerely apologise for the issue.
The vulnerability allows users with read-only or read/write access to escalate their privileges and eventually become administrators. To exploit it, an attacker must have access to an account on TheHive with read-only or read/write privileges.
The attacker needs to interact with the API in a specific yet trivial way to obtain administrator privileges. After verifying that their request has been correctly processed, they connect to TheHive using the Web UI and they will see the administrator menu from where they can edit or lock user accounts, add case templates, etc.
And Now What?
We highly recommend you to update to TheHive 3.3.1 which completely fixes the vulnerability. If you are still using TheHive 2.x and have not made the move to TheHive 3 yet, please update to TheHive 2.13.4 which also addresses this flaw.
If you cannot immediately apply the hotfixes we have released, a shell script is still available and will allow you to spot anyone who exploited the vulnerability. You can download this script from the following location:
When you run the script, it will display all users that have changed their roles. If a single match is found, it means your instance has been potentially compromised. We advise you to create a crontab which will execute the script on a regular basis until you apply the hotfixes.
If you are performing a fresh installation, read the installation guide corresponding to your needs and enjoy. Please note that you can install TheHive using an RPM or DEB package, use Docker, install it from a binary or build it from sources.
If you are using TheHive 3.x, upgrade to TheHive 3.3.1 by updating the binary package on your system.
Support
Something does not work as expected? You have troubles installing or upgrading? No worries, please join our user forum, contact us on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org. We are here to help.
TheHive Project 