TheHive 4.0-RC2, Fresh out of the Oven

Shortly after the release of TheHive 4.0 RC-1 in February 2020, many members of our community tested it and provided great feedback, spotting issues here and there. We would like to wholeheartedly thank all of those who, like us, want to make TheHive 4.0 a great, rock-solid release!

We are now happy to unveil the 2nd release candidate. It fixes many bugs and introduce – or reintroduce – some new (and old) features :-). In this blog post, we will concentrate on the following features:

2FA
Age of cases
Reintroduction of webhooks

Please read the changelog for a more comprehensive view, including bugfixes.

And since the COVID-19 crisis is here to stay for quite some time, we don’t want you to rediscover boredom, a dreadful feeling long forgotten thanks to the continued stream of notifications, solicitations and attention-grabbing, 280 chars ‘thoughts’. So instead of getting bored, we invite you to test TheHive 4.0-RC2 to the best extent possible and, should you encounter any issue, please let us know. We want to issue the final release during the summer so that everyone can have it just in time for their forthcoming vacations at home!

2FA

Two factor authentication was initially scheduled for the final release. We changed our minds and decided to offer you the possibility to test this feature right away to gather your feedback and improvement ideas before we finish up baking the final recipe.

Users can enable 2FA from their account. To enable it, first go to your account Settings and check Enable Multi-Factor Authentication.

Once done, you are invited to use your preferred TOTP application (Google Authenticator, Authy, Microsoft Authenticator etc.) to scan the QR code or the code underneath it. Your 2FA will generate A TOTP that you should supply in the MFA Code area. If it is valid, 2FA will be activated.

Important notes:

If a user loses access to their TOTP application, only an administrator can restore access to their account.
If an org administrator loses access to their TOTP application and they are the only administrator for that org, only a super admin can restore access to their account.
If a super admin loses access to their TOTP application and they are the only super admin of the instance, they should pack up their things and look for another job. That or use a magic DB command to restore access to their account. We’ll update the documentation accordingly.
The current implementation of 2FA does not support backup codes or alternate authentication methods should a user loses access to their TOTP application. However, we are considering adding backup codes to the final release.
2FA cannot be enforced by default for all users at this stage. It is thus of rather marginal value. However, an org admin can see from the UI who did not activate it and pester them until they do. In the same way, a super admin can do the same for org admins, other super admins and mere users. We are updating the documentation to add an API query that will allow you to list all users who did not activate 2FA.
We will consider making 2FA mandatory in TheHive 4.1.

Next time you log in, you will need to supply the TOTP verification code in addition to your login and password.

TOTP verification code required at login

Age of Cases

A new information regarding case duration has been added in the list of cases and in case view, so you can easily keep an eye on how old your cases are and activate your escalation procedures etc. if necessary.

Webhooks are back!

TheHive 4.0-RC1 was released without webhooks. They have been reintroduced in this version. You can now configure TheHive 4.0 to use them, but also filter data sent to the remote server by Organisation.

How to report issues

Please open an issue on GitHub using the template made for TheHive4 if you’d like to report a bug on this version. We will monitor those closely and respond accordingly.

Mum, Docker Docks Don’t Dock Well!

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 😰

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/8021817@N07/6262431675

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! 💪🏼

Cortex 3.0.1: The ‘Better Logging’ Edition

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
#242 Remove references to Google Fonts
#238 The Docker image had 4 critical CVEs and 69 high CVEs (*cough*). Contributed by Micheal Hart
#239 Missing dependency for cluster bug
#234 fixes a bug where old, non-existent analysers were still showing in Cortex after an upgrade. Contributed by daskydasky
#241 Analyzer reports no output when it fails
#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.

UnshortenLink, SSRF and Cortex-Analyzers 1.15.2

We urge our fellow fighters of cybercrime and funny and not-so-funny animals-in-disguise, to update their Cortex analyzers to the latest 1.15.2 version which plugs a serious vulnerability in the Unshortenlink analyzer and fixes several bugs.

Unshortenlink Vulnerability

On Jan 24, Alexandre Basquin discovered a SSRF vulnerability in the Unshortenlink 1.0 analyzer. By exploiting it, an attacker which has access to a Cortex instance with an analyze role can scan the ports of localhost and possibly of all the hosts reachable by Cortex. This could be automated through Cortex4py by making repetitive calls to the API and thus scanning multiple ports & hosts. In essence, the attacker can perform reconnaissance thanks to Unshortenlink and gain knowledge on which ports are open and which aren’t.

Version 1.1 of Unshortenlink, included in Cortex-Analyzers 1.15.2, plugs this vulnerability by disabling submissions containing IPs & ports. Only URLs are now accepted.

Bug Fixes

Additionally, Cortex-Analyzers 1.15.2 corrects the following bugs:

#416: the Mailer responder now supports UTF-8 encoding.
#410: remove wrapping of the results produced by crt.sh as a list which ends up breaking the output of the report template. Contributed by Thomas Kastner.
#409: enum is not required for Python 3.4+ to make the MISP Search analyzer work.
#408: FileInfo’s Manalyze plugin did not work after Manalyze renamed plugin_btcaddress to plugin_cryptoaddress.
#406: fix a broken link in the Cymon_Check_IP report, submitted by Manabu Niseki.
#313: fix wrong file handling in OTXQuery.

How to Update your Analyzers?

To update your analyzers to version 1.15.2, please read the Updating section of the Cortex installation guide.

Since the version numbers of few analyzers have changed, you’ll need to connect as an orgadmin to Cortex to refresh the analyzer list, disabling old ones and enabling the new versions.

TheHive Report Templates

If you are using TheHive, you must import the new report templates in your instance as follows:

download the updated package
log in TheHive using an administrator account
go to Admin > Report templates menu
click on Import templates button and select the downloaded package

Wait a Minute! Where’s the Blog Post about 1.15.1?

Good catch! There was no blog post about Cortex-Analyzers 1.15.1. Call us lazy but there was nothing Earth-shattering, pole-shifting in that release. Nonetheless, here are a list of fixes included in that release and from which you’ll inherit automatically if you update 1.15.0 to 1.15.2 directly:

#402: Malwares analyzer code relied on functionality that’s only available in Python 3.7+. It has been fixed to work with 3.4 and up thanks to the work of Arcuri Davide.
#404: fixes a bad folder renaming in the HIBP (Have I Been Pwned) analyzer.
#398: MISP Search analyzer wouldn’t run without the enum dependency. Contributed by Mars Huang. Later improved in 1.15.2 (see above).

No Luck Luke?

If something does not work as expected, keep calm and ask on our user forum, reach out to fellow users on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org.

TheHive 3.3-RC2, Hot out of the Oven

TheHive Project’s code Chefs, dressed in their outright haute cuisine outfit, including the traditional toque blanche, have been quite busy lately, working on dockerizing all the Cortex analyzers (more on this later in an upcoming post), and doing tedious work to prepare the replacement of Elasticsearch by a GraphDB which will help us finally release much-awaited features such as multi-tenancy, delayed for way too many months (yeah, yeah, don’t chastise them but feel free to help them). In the meantime, they found enough bandwidth to release a new major version of TheHive.

Version 3.3, currently a release candidate includes several bug fixes and many new features as outlined below. Please note that TheHive 3.3-RC2 is beta software. As all our other release candidates, you can grab it from the pre-release, beta repositories. As usual, we would truly appreciate your help making it a great stable release by testing it as thoroughly as possible and reporting back any bugs or issues you encounter so we can address them before the final release.

Check TheHive Installation guide for further details.

Wait! Where’s RC1?

TheHive 3.3-RC1 was very short-lived. Few hours after its release, and thanks to Chris (a.k.a. crackytsi on GitHub), Thomas Franco, our back-end mastermind, discovered an issue with the Debian 8 and Debian 9 packages.

New Features

#836: add a new exportCaseTags parameter to the MISP configuration section. If set to true, all the tags associated with a case will be exported along with it to MISP.
#861: add support for Java higher than 8, such as OpenJDK 11.
#271: bulk merge alerts into a case. Select multiple alerts at once and create a single case out of them or merge them into an existing case using its ID.
#824: add ability to sort alerts by reference, status, type, source…
#826: when previewing an alert, there are sometimes no overlap with an existing case. However, an analyst might already know, thanks to HI (Human Intelligence), that the alert should be merged into a specific case. This is now possible thanks to a new button.
#769: improve case template selection for case creation. If you have defined a large set of case templates, you will be able to sort/filter to find the case you want to use when creating a New Case.

#657: add observable tags auto-completion. Contributed by Tyler Chong (Thanks!).

Fixed Bugs

#864: do not return a session cookie when making an API call.
#856: there was a bug where after a followed alert PATCH, if the alert has already been promoted to a case, the case is not updated. Now, if the alert has follow=true, if it gets updated, its status is set to Updated and the related case is updated too.
#845: assigned but unstarted tasks were not showing up in My Tasks.
#844: enable user account locking through the Delete API endpoint.

Stuck?

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.

Cortex 2.1.3: Security and Beyond

TheHive Project’s code Chefs are happy to announce the immediate availability of Cortex 2.1.3, a hotfix for your favorite observable and response engine, fresh out of the oven!

We highly recommend that you upgrade your existing installation to this new version as soon as feasible as it plugs a significant security vulnerability, kindly reported by Po-Hsing Wu. The vulnerability is a privilege escalation one which allows an orgadmin to create a superadmin user. The culprit has been punished by having to chant Perl mantras while doing a handstand on burning coals.

: Source : XKCD

Additionally, Cortex 2.1.3 fixes the following bugs:

#157: list and disable invalid responders
#152: enforce PAP when launching an analyzer from the Cortex Web UI
#147: add dig to the Cortex docker image as the SinkDB analyzer needs it
#146: the Cortex job list must display the PAP value
#145: fix the broken Web UI’s search function for job history

Pardon my French but do you speak English?

Something does not work as expected? You have troubles installing or upgrading? Spotted new bugs? No worries, please open issues on GitHub or comment on existing ones, join our user forum, contact us on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org. We are here to help.

TheHive 3.2.0-RC1: The MISP Love Edition

Guess what? Our integration with MISP, the de facto standard for threat sharing, has just gotten better with our latest beta release: TheHive 3.2.0-RC1.

While you could synchronize TheHive with one or multiple MISP instances in earlier versions and select events using filters like their age, the number of attributes they contain or exclude those which are created by specific organisations or contain one or several black-listed tags, 3.2.0-RC1 adds the ability to whitelist tags, thus limiting the events that would show up in TheHive’s Alerts pane to only those which have been tagged with labels your SOC/CSIRT/CERT needs to act on. This can be very useful for example if your Cyber Threat Intelligence analysts pre-select or create events in MISP and tag for SOC consumption those that need to be acted on.

TheHive, Cortex, MISP: The Power DFIR & CTI Trio

To use this feature, use the whitelist.tags parameter in the MISP section of TheHive’s application.conf as described in the documentation.

This new version also adds the ability to create dashboards out of responder actions, log responder operations, and offers a confirmation dialog before running a responder to avoid noob over-clicks and errors made by seasoned incident handlers running low on caffeine.

TheHive 3.2.0-RC1 will also show you the description of an observable if any while hovering over one in the Observables tab. You can also see observable tags when previewing an alert in the Alerts pane.

Last but not least, some users reported severe problems when they enabled TLS/SSL directly on TheHive without resorting to a reverse proxy such as NGINX. Blame that on the crappy TLS support in Play framework ;-). So we highly recommend using a reverse proxy for that purpose, and delegate authentication to it if you are relying on X.509 authentication, as TheHive 3.2.0-RC1 allows you to. Please check the Single Sign-On on TheHive with X.509 Certificates guide for further information.

For additional details on this release, please check the full changelog.

Warning Capt’n Robinson!

The RC in 3.2.0-RC1 stands for Release Candidate. Please help us make a great stable release out of it by testing it as thoroughly as possible and reporting back any bugs or issues you encounter so we can address them before the final release. You’ll find this release candidate in the pre-release, beta repositories.

Please check TheHive Installation guide for further details.

You got a problem?

Cortex 101: Dissecting Observables a Hundred Ways

TheHive Project’s Code Chefs are glad to announce that, thanks to the precious contributions of the user community, Cortex has broken the one hundred analyzer mark.

Cortex-Analyzers version 1.14.0 is out and includes new analyzers, some improvements and some bug fixes.

New Analyzers

New and enhanced analyzers, described below, are:

Cisco Investigate by Cisco Umbrella Research @opendns
Proofpoint Forensics Lookup by Emmanuel Torquato
Proofpoint Threat Insight Forensics Analyzer by Emmanuel Torquato
RecordedFuture by jojoob
urlscan.io search by ninoseki
Google DNS over HTTP by 0xswitch
RTF files support in FileInfo by Nils Kuhnert
Datascan and Inetnum flavors in Onyphe analyzer by Pierre Baudry and Adrien Barchapt

Again, huge thanks for the awesome work that has been performed by all our contributors!

Investigate

Cisco Umbrella Investigate provides threat intelligence about domains and IP addresses accross the Internet. The analyzer can be used to query the Cisco Umbrella (formerly OpenDNS) API and get information about an IP or a domain name. An API key is required to use this analyzer.

Results are displayed in TheHive in the following manner:

sc-investigate-long — Cisco Investigate: short and long reports

Proofpoint Forensics Lookup

According to Proofpoint’s website, the Forensics API allows insight in detailed forensic evidences about individual threats or compaigns. The analyzer can be used to check observables against given indicators of compromise stored in the ProofPoint service.

Unfortunately, there are currently no sample report screenshots available, because TheHive’s Core Team does not have access to Proofpoint services. Also, due to the same reason, this analyzer could not be tested by us. If you have access to the service and can test the analyzer and/or provide report screenshots, please let us know.

RecordedFuture

This analyzer lets you get the latest risk data from RecordedFuture for a hash, domain or an IP address. It can be used to query the API and get information. An API key is required to use this analyzer.

Results are displayed in TheHive in the following manner:

sc-recordedfuture-long — RecordedFuture: short and long reports

Urlscan.io search

Urlscan.io is a service that scans and analyzes websites. Submitted pages will be browsed like a regular user would do and every activity gets recorded. The analyzer submitted by ninoseki queries urlscan without initiating a scan which would be publicly visible on the website. Accepted datatypes for this analyzer are URL, domain, hash and IP.

The templates which display the results of the analyzer look like the following screenshots:

Screenshot from 2018-10-25 09-48-58 — Urlscan.io: short and long reports

Google DNS over HTTP

This analyzer provides DNS information for an IP, a domain or a FQDN by making calls to Google DNS-over-HTTP (DoH). No API key is required.

Results are displayed in TheHive in the following manner:

sc-googleDNS-long — Google DNS: short and long reports

RTF files support in FileInfo

The FileInfo meta analyzer has been improved and now leverages the rtfobj tool provided in the Oletools suite by Decalage.

Results are displayed in TheHive in the following manner:

sc-rtfobj-long — FileInfo with rtfobj: short and long reports

Datascan and Inetnum flavors in Onyphe analyzer

The Onyphe analyzer has been enhanced with two new flavors. Datascan provides information about known open ports on a specific IP, and Inetnum enumerates all known network information about the analyzed IP address.

An API key is required to use the analyzer and can be obtained by creating an account on the Onyphe website.

Results are displayed in TheHive in the following manner:

sc-onyphe_inetnum-long — Onyphe Inetnum: short and long reports

sc-onyphe_datascan-long — Onyphe Datascan: long and short reports

Bug fixes and enhancements

#248: Improve error msg when VT Get Report does not have an entry for
#323: Fix an issue with HybridAnalysis analyzer filenames handler
#329: Enhance PassiveTotal Passive DNS report
#348: Fix a typo in URLhaus’s long.html
#356 : Force the use of Python3 in MISP analyzer
#362: Fix file not found issue and empty result set in CERT.at passive DNS analyzer

Get It While Supply Lasts!

Each analyzer comes with its own, pip compatible requirements.txt file. To update your Cortex analyzers to 1.14.0, run the following commands:

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

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.

Update TheHive Report Templates

If you are using TheHive, get the latest version of the report templates and import them into TheHive.

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!

TheHive 3.1.2 & Cortex 2.1.2 Released

We could not leave for the week-end without issuing a minor release or two so here we go.

TheHive 3.1.2

Starting from TheHive 3.0.1, an administrator has the ability to configure Cortex job polling by defining the time between two polls thanks to the cortex.refreshDelay parameter as well as the number of consecutive failures before giving up (via cortex.MaxRetryOnError). However, these settings prevent the service from starting correctly. TheHive 3.1.2 corrects this issue.

Cortex 2.1.2

When running a job in Cortex with the exact same details, the function findSimilarJob is called. It should return results from any previous jobs, but in the latest versions (2.1.0, 2.1.1) it does not because of a change that went past our QA.

In a similar fashion, the GUI search function was broken. Cortex 2.1.2 fixes both issues.

Excuse my French but I Need Help

Keep calm. We speak French. So if you encounter any difficulty to update TheHive or Cortex, please join our user forum, contact us on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org. We are always ready to help as does our user community.

TheHive4py 1.5.1 Released

When you need to interact with TheHive’s REST API and you ain’t shy of working with Python, TheHive4py is the way to go. It’s a free, open source library we provide to allow you to easily create alert feeders, automate certain tasks like creating cases, assign them to analysts and much more. For example, Synapse, DigitalShadows2TH and Zerofox2TH leverage the library to send alerts to your favourite SIRP/SOAR.

Sometime ago, we decided that it was time to overhaul the whole library and we began working on version 2.0.0 which will be easier to use. It should also support the full set of TheHive’s REST API calls. In the meantime we decided to release version 1.5.0, shortly followed by version 1.5.1 to support some new functionality contributed by our user community and correct a few issues.

New Features Introduced in 1.5.0

#79: Add search support for tasks, contributed by neok0
#83: Add a simple template search method, contributed by uplateandonline
#86: Add the ability to promote an alert into a case, contributed by uplateandonline

Bugfixes Introduced in 1.5.0

#80: Prevent max recursion depth exceeded error, contributed by Psynbiotik

New Features Introduced in 1.5.1

#87: Add custom fields to alerts, contributed by Zachary Priddy

Important note: TheHive4py 1.5.1 does not work with TheHive 3.0.10 or earlier versions. Please stick with 1.5.0 if you are using those versions.

Updating/Installing

To update your existing package:

$ sudo pip install thehive4py --upgrade

If you are just getting started with TheHive4py, you can forgo the --upgrade at the end of the command above.

But I just Wanna Play!

If you’d like to play around with TheHive4py 1.5.1, TheHive 3.1.1., Cortex4py 2.0.1 and Cortex 2.1.1, please download the training VM.

Paris? Are you There?

Shall you encounter any difficulty, please join our user forum, contact us on Gitter, or send us an email at support@thehive-project.org. As usual, we’ll be more than happy to help!

Correction: October 12, 2018
As reported by Robin Hahling, TheHive 1.5.1 does not work with TheHive 3.0.10 or earlier versions.