RedELK – Red Team’s SIEM

December 10, 2018 haxf4rall2017 Red Team’s SIEM: RedELK, redelk

Red Team’s SIEM – easy deployable tool for Red Teams used for tracking and alarming about Blue Team activities as well as better usability for the Red Team in long term operations.

When performing multi-month, multi-C2teamserver and multi-scenario red team operations, you are working with an infrastructure that becomes very large quickly. This makes it harder to keep track of what is happening on it. Coupled with the ever-increasing maturity of blue teams, this makes it more likely the blue team is somewhere analysing parts of your infra and/or artefacts.

In this presentation we’ll show you how you can use that to your advantage. We’ll present different ways to keep track of the blue team’s analyses and detections, and to dynamically adjust your infra to fool the blue team. We will first set the scene by explaining common and lesser known components of red teaming infrastructures, e.g. dynamic redirectors, domain fronting revisited, decoy websites, html-smuggling, etc. Secondly, we’ll show how to centralize all your infrastructure’s and ops’ information to an ELK stack, leaving it open for intelligent querying across the entire infrastructure and operation. This will also help with better feedback to the blue team at the end of the engagement. Lastly, we’ll dive into novel ways of detecting a blue team’s investigation and we’ll give examples on how to react to these actions, for example by creating honeypots for the blue team.

Goal of the project

Short: a Red Team’s SIEM.

Longer: a Red Team’s SIEM that serves three goals:

Enhanced usability and overview for the red team operators by creating a central location where all relevant operational logs from multiple teamservers are collected and enriched. This is great for historic searching within the operation as well as giving a read-only view on the operation (e.g. for the White Team). Especially useful for multi-scenario, multi-teamserver, multi-member and multi-month operations. Also, super easy ways for viewing all screenshots, IOCs, keystrokes output, etc. \o/
Spot the Blue Team by having a central location where all traffic logs from redirectors are collected and enriched. Using specific queries its now possible to detect that the Blue Team is investigating your infrastructure.
Out-of-the-box usable by being easy to install and deploy, as well as having ready made views, dashboards and alarms.

Here’s a conceptual overview of how RedELK works.

RedELK uses the typical components Filebeat (shipping), Logstash (filtering), Elasticsearch (storage) and Kibana (viewing). Rsync is used for a second syncing of teamserver data: logs, keystrokes, screenshots, etc. Nginx is used for authentication to Kibana, as well as serving the screenshots, beaconlogs, keystrokes in an easy way in the operator’s browser.

A set of python scripts are used for heavy enriching of the log data, and for for Blue Team detection.