I think we’ve all been there before – you log on to a server remotely via RDP, and do the needful – but don’t immediately log off. But then you get distracted by a phone call, an email, a chat, or a good old-fashioned physical interaction with another human being. So when it comes time clock out for the night, you shut down your computer or log off. Or maybe you’ve been working on a laptop and your VPN got interrupted. The result is the same – previously active RDP sessions are automatically disconnected. Or maybe one (not you, of course) purposely disconnects their session so that the next login process is faster.
Well whatever may be the reason, a key issue with disconnected RDP sessions is that, by default, they remain connected indefinitely until the server gets rebooted, you login again (because you forgot to do something?), or a coworker notices the offense and politely requests you log off.
At this point you’re probably thinking “OK, yes, but who really cares“? With all the serious stuff that’s going on around you, you’re probably wondering why the heck you suddenly need to worry about disconnected RDP sessions? Well, disconnected RDP sessions can be problematic for a number of reasons:
Potential Issues
Confusion
It can be confusing when you’re logging on to a server and notice that another user is logged on, even if it’s just a disconnected session. Are they doing important stuff? Can the other user by logged off? Or you’re trying to reboot a server, but the infamous “Other users are currently logged on … ” message pops up. Assuming you’re polite, you’ll reach out to the disconnected fellow to ensure that the user isn’t running any important apps. In short, it’s a pain. And we all have enough pain as it is, do we not?
Security
So this is the fun one and, I admit, the real reason for this blog post (no, it was not the confusion). Turns out that any local administrator has the ability to hijack any disconnected session on the server he or she is an administrator on. And while this doesn’t sound like a huge problem at first (if the user is already an admin, then he can do anything blah blah), there is a very specific scenario where this is a significant security risk. Being an admin on a machine is a great privilege, but hardly the key to the kingdom. If a domain admin (or even worse, an Enterprise Admin!) however logs on to the same host and disconnects their session, then the local admin can promote himself/herself to domain admin at no cost (EventSentry would of course detect this) by simply taking over the disconnected session. The process involves only a handful of commands, one of which is creating a temporary service (EventSentry would detect this also).
Resource Consumption
Processes from disconnected sessions do continue to run and consume some processing power, which can be an issue in environments with limited computing power or cloud environments where you pay for CPU time. It’s unlikely to have a large impact but it could add up for larger deployments.
I’m hoping that we can (almost) all agree now that disconnected sessions have a number of drawbacks, so let’s move on to ways to address this.
Solutions
User Education
While there are ways to forcefully log off idle users (see below), I think it’s important to make your admins aware that disconnected sessions pose a security risk, but also communicate to your users in general that disconnected sessions should be avoided when necessary. While this won’t solve the problem entirely, it will hopefully get some of your users to be more aware.
Notifications
EventSentry users can utilize filter timers to get notified when a user has been logged on to a server too long. Those not familiar with filter timers can learn more about them here. In short, filter timers work with events that are usually logged in pairs – such as a process start/process end, logon/logoff, service stop/service start etc – and can notify you when such an event pair is incomplete. For example, a logon is recorded but not followed by a logoff within a certain amount of time (the time period is configurable).
So in this scenario, a user’s logon event would start a filter timer that essentially puts the original event on hold. It won’t forward it to a notification just yet – only if the timer expires and no subsequent event has deleted the timer. A later logoff event (that is linked to the logon event via some property of the event like a login ID) would end the filter timer. If the logoff event does not happen (or happen too late), EventSentry will release the pending (logon) event and can send a notification to let either the team or the user know (if the login pattern matches email addresses) that the filter time has expired.
BONUS: If the Windows username can be matched to an email address (e.g. username is john.doe and the email address is john.doe@mycorp.com), then EventSentry can even send an email directly to the user (opposed to a generic email) reminding them to log off. Even better, the email can be customized and provide specific instructions. See KB 465 for instructions on how to configure this in EventSentry. The screenshot below shows such a customized email.
Disclaimer: This method doesn’t necessarily distinguish between users who are logged on and users who have disconnected sessions. It detects that a user has had a Windows session active for an extended time period. In most cases this should work reasonably well to detect disconnected sessions as well. especially with longer timer periods (since most users don’t need to be logged on to a server for many hours).
Forcibly logging off disconnected sessions
When you tried your best the nice way using education and emails and it’s just not working, well, then it turns out that Windows allows you to use the nuclear button – logging off disconnected user sessions after a certain time. Since this can be configured via group policy, implementing this is fairly easy. Simply create a new group policy and assign it to appropriate OU(s) and configure the following setting:
Local Computer Policy
|-- Computer Configuration
|-- Administrative Templates
|-- Windows Components
|-- Remote Desktop Services
|-- Remote Desktop Session Host
|-- Session Time Limits
Then simply enable the option and configure an appropriate time limit. The available timeout options are actually quite useful and range from 1 minute (which pretty much converts a disconnect with a logoff) all the way up to 5 days (which is better than nothing I suppose, but why even bother at that point?). What option you select here largely depends on how concerned you are about resource usage and sessions being hijacked. I personally would recommend a lower end of 30 minutes up to 8 hours at the maximum.
Validating RDP settings with EventSentry Validation Scripts
EventSentry includes two validation scripts that validate whether RDP session timeouts are enabled:
Disconnected RDP sessions aren’t an immediate security risk, since they require an intruder to somehow gain admin rights on a domain member machine first. Sophisticated attacks however rarely involve just one step, but usually take advantage of multiple vulnerabilities and exploits. Since there are few to no downsides to notifying or even logging off users after a certain amount of time, I would recommend to follow the recommendations outlined in this blog post.
Monitoring temperature and humidity in a server room are quite important if you want to reduce the risk of expensive equipment failure. Yet, many server rooms either aren’t monitored at all or rely on ancient wall-thermostats that, in case of a problem, only emit desperate beeps that nobody will hear.
There are a lot of environmental sensors available to purchase, but many of these have a number of limitations:
Expensive
Only measure temperature
Don’t support SNMP
Require specific software
No display
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just create your own, networked environmental sensor that measures both temperature and humidity for around USD 100? In this post we’ll show you how to assemble this apparatus – based on a Raspberry Pi (most models work) – that does all this:
Measures temperature
Measures humidity
Measures light (bonus!)
Networked
Accessible via SNMP
Shows current values on a display
You neither need to be an electronics whiz and nor will you need a soldering iron and block off an afternoon to “build” this sensor. The only assembling required is to connect the environment sensor “enviro” to the Raspberry Pi on its 40-pin connector. But let’s start with the require hardware (more details and purchase links are in section 6 below)
Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 (ideally with an ethernet port, Pi Zero with external USB ethernet adapters works too)
Once you have all the hardware together, simply connect the enviro sensor to the Raspberry Pi by gently pushing it onto the Raspberry Pi and connect the power adapter. The emphasis is on gently since the connector can sometimes be a tight fit and being impatient can damage the connector on the Raspberry Pi or the sensor. Once you’ve joined the two things together it’s time to address the software side of things and prepare the microSD card, for which you have 2 options:
1a. Use our pre-built image and simply change the IP address and password (fastest and easiest) 1b. Install a standard Raspbian OS and configure the sensor, scripts and SNMP daemon manually
1a. Using the Pre-Built Image
First, download the image file and decompress it. While that’s downloading, download the Raspberry Pi Imager for your OS and insert the microSD card into your computer or adapter. Launch the imager once the image has been downloaded. In the imager, click CHOOSE OS and select Use custom. Then click on CHOOSE STORAGE and select the microSD card you’ll be using and click WRITE.
When complete, insert the microSD card into the Raspberry Pi, connect it to your LAN and power it up. The pre-built image is ready to go, and the only configuration necessary is setting a static IP address. You can do this either via SSH if you can determine its IP address (either through DHCP logs or ARP activity – if you have EventSentry installed then it can help with both) or with keyboard and monitor via HDMI. The default username and password for our image are:
Username: pi Password: BlackRaspbe11y& Hostname: eventsentry-enviro
Once you’re connected and logged in, it’s recommended to update all software packages of the Raspberry Pi to the latest version with the following commands:
While not always necessary, reboot the Raspberry Pi after the last step and log in again. Then, issue the following command to open the network configuration file and set a static IP address:
sudo nano /etc/dhcpcd.conf
The nano text editor works like any Windows-based editor where you can navigate with the arrow keys. The configuration file already contains sample entries for a static IP address as shown in the screenshot below.
As such, simply scroll down to this section and replace the same IP addresses with the actual IP addresses of your router, DNS server and of course the desired IP address for your networked sensor. Don’t forget to uncomment the new configuration by removing the heading # characters. An example configuration is also shown below:
Once the configuration looks ok, hit CTRL+O followed by CTRL+X. The final step is to resize the root partition so that it utilizes the entire space available on the SD card (assuming the SD card is larger than 4Gb). This step is optional but recommended since it’s both easy and fast. From the terminal, run
sudo raspi-config
and select the following:
6 Advanced OptionsA1 Expand Filesystem
Note that there is no confirmation after selecting “Expand Filesystem”, instead you will be prompted to reboot the raspberry pi since the file system will be resized during the next boot. If you chose not to reconfigure the file system then reboot the device by running sudo reboot.
1b. Manual Setup with Raspbian
Insert the microSD card into your computer or adapter, download the Raspberry Pi Imager for your preferred OS and launch it. In the imager, click CHOOSE OS and select the first option, Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit). Then click on CHOOSE STORAGE and select the microSD card you’ll be using and click WRITE.
When complete, insert the microSD card into the Raspberry Pi, connect it to your LAN, connect a monitor & keyboard and power it up. After it booted, follow the setup process which will let you pick a language and ensure that your Pi is up to date.
In the OS settings, enable SSH access if you want to manage the pi remotely later.
Installing the enviro library
Open the terminal window and execute the following commands. I recommend installing the examples too when prompted. This basically enables support for the sensor in the OS and installs example Python scripts. If you do not change directories, then the files will be installed in /home/pi/enviroplus-python.
The EventSentry git repository contains two scripts and a MIB file to integrate the enviro sensor with the local SNMP daemon. The Python script (eventsentry_enviro.py) runs in the background, constantly polling the sensor, and writes the current readings to temp files. The Perl script (eventsentry_enviro_snmp_pass.pl) is called by the SNMP daemon whenever a specific OID is called and provides the temperature, humidity and light readings via SNMP.
Execute the following command, which will place all files in /home/pi/sensors/raspberry_enviro:
git clone https://github.com/eventsentry/sensors
Activate background polling script
The eventsentry_enviro.py script needs to be launched at startup and run in the background (via cron) in order to continuously poll the sensor and save current values to temp files. Run crontab -e and add the following line to the configuration:
With snmpd installed and the scripts downloaded, they can be integrated by editing the /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf file with
sudo nano /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf
The following lines need to be added to the snmpd.conf file. I would recommend adding them to the sections were similar entries already exist to make it easier to manage in the future:
view systemonly included .1.3.6.1.4.1.21600 pass .1.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1 /usr/bin/perl /home/pi/sensors/raspberry_enviro/eventsentry_enviro_snmp_pass.pl
Just like before, save your changes in nano with CTRL+O followed by CTRL+X. If you prefer to change the default SNMP community (from the default “public”) then that can be done in the snmpd.conf file as well. When done, restart snmpd with the command below. This is technically optional since we’ll be restarting the Pi anyways, but not a bad idea to make sure there are no configuration errors in the snmpd.conf file.
sudo service snmpd restart
Finalize
To launch the all important eventsentry_enviro.py script and make sure your Raspberry Pi is self-sufficient even after a power failure reboot the pi again with
sudo reboot
2. Polling & Testing via SNMP
At this point you should be able to query the current temperature, humidity and light level with any SNMP manager, such as EventSentry. The EventSentry MIB has been updated to support the enviro sensor, and all values are returned as part of a table, making it easy to add additional readings without having to change the configuration on the SNMP manager (at least with EventSentry). The key connection details are as follows:
SNMP Version: 1, 2c SNMP Community: public
One way to obtain the current values is with snmpwalk that is available with pretty much every Unix/Linux distribution and also installed on your Raspberry Pi.From the command line issue the following snmpwalk command (adjust the community if you changed it):
snmpwalk -v 2c -c public 127.0.0.1 1.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1
which should yield output similar to what’s shown below:
Where the temperature is 63 degrees F, the humidity is 18% and the current light level is 1 Lux.
3. Integrating with EventSentry
Integrating the sensor is straightforward and done in the management console. You can either add a single object in EventSentry that receives the values for all instances (temperature, humidity & light), or setup individual counters for each reading. The latter option requires additional configuration but allows you to setup individual alerts, something that is not possible with the first option.
3a. Adding all SNMP counters in a single object (table support)
If you want to skip steps 1-5 below then you can download a pre-made package from the management console. Simply click on “Packages”, click “Download” in the ribbon, proceed with the download and then select the “RaspberryPi Enviro” package from the “System Health Packages” section and import it. If, on the other hand, you want to practice your performance monitoring skills in EventSentry then follow steps 1-5 below:
Open the management console
Add the raspberry pi to an existing group under “Computer Groups”, or create a new group and add it there.
Select the host you just added and click the “Authentication” button in the ribbon to specify the SNMP credentials.
Under “Packages” – “System Health”, create a new package or find an existing one. Add the “Performance” object to that package if it doesn’t already exist.
Click the “Performance” object and add a performance counter as shown in the screenshot below.
Alerts are configured on the “Alerts” tab but would affect all counters. This could be tricky, since you would not be able to set an alert for humidity > 60 and an alert for temperature > 80. Still, in this scenario you could actually setup an alert for a value > 80 that would likely be useful for both temperature and humidity, since you would probably not want either of those to be over 80. At a minimum, click the History & Trending tab to store collected values in a database. To verify that the raspberry pi is reachable via SNMP, click the Test button and enter the host name you added to the group earlier.
Showing temperature readings from 2 Piemoroni enviro sensors side-by-side in EventSentry
See the next section on how to setup individual counters for temperature, humidity and light.
3b. Setting up individual counters for temperature, humidity and light
The configuration for individual objects is very similar to the previous approach. Table support will not be used however, and each counter will have its index value appended to the original OID used in 3a.
Add the raspberry pi to an existing group under “Computer Groups”, or create a new group and add it there.
Select the host you just added and click the “Authentication” button in the ribbon to specify the SNMP credentials.
Under “Packages” – “System Health”, create a new package or find an existing one. Add the “Performance” object to that package if it doesn’t already exist.
Click the “Performance” object and add three performance counters as shown in the screenshot below.
Temperature Counter
Then, simply duplicate the above setting for humdity and, if required, for the light sensor as well. You just have to change the Name and the SNMP counter as shown above. Since every measurement now has its own counter, it is possible to setup individual alerts.
To verify that the raspberry pi is reachable via SNMP, click the Test button and enter the host name you added to the group earlier.
4. Accuracy
The enviro sensor uses the BME 280 by Bosch to measure temperature, humidity and pressure. You can review the datasheet of the BME 280 sensor for more information on accuracy, operating ranges and such. The overall accuracy for the temperature sensor is about +/- 3 degrees Fahrenheit, the humidity sensor has a similar accuracy of about +/- 3%.
Since the sensor board sits directly on top of the Raspberry Pi, Pimoroni explains that the temperature of the Raspberry Pi board (the CPU in particular) can affect the temperature readings, causing them to be higher than the actual surrounding temperature. I suspect that different Pi models (Pi v3, v4, PiZero, …) will affect the temperature differently. They do include a Python script that automatically corrects that, and our script does as well. Still, I would probably not use this sensor for scientific measurements that require a high accuracy. However, for normal usage where you are mainly trying to determine whether a specific location is dangerously hot (or humid), the sensor’s accuracy should be more than sufficient.
5. Visual Alerts
By default, the sensor will show the temperature or humidity in red under the following circumstances:
1. The temperature is higher than 80F 2. The humidity is lower than 10%
These thresholds are hard-coded in the eventsentry_enviro.py script and can easily be changed. Simply open the script in an editor and adjust these lines on the top of the script:
thresholdTemp = 80 thresholdHumidity = 10
Restart the Pi so that the new values become effective.
6. Hardware
Here are some links to the required hardware for this project in one place. Again, keep in mind that at the time of writing the Raspberry Pi 4 (and 3) are somewhat hard to get so you may need to try different sites or even pre-order.
When purchasing the standard Pi case it’s recommended to leave the top off, so that the sensor readings are more accurate. We are currently working on creating a custom case that will only cover part of the case in order to ensure the sensors are not blocked – stay tuned!
7. Troubleshooting
Sometimes thing just don’t work like the should no matter how hard you try. Here are the most common things to check if you are unable to retrieve the environment measurements via SNMP:
Enviro Sensor
Since everything ultimately depends on the actual hardware sensor working, the first troubleshooting step would be to make sure that the sensor is working. You can of course skip this step if the sensor LCD display is showing environment readings.
If you are getting error messages then see ” Installing the enviro library” earlier and rever to the enviro web page for more information.
Automatic Sensor Polling
It’s important that the EventSentry enviro polling script is launched automatically at boot, see section “Activate background polling script” earlier. You can run the following command to verify that the script is indeed running. You should see lines.
If you’re getting environment measurements and the SNMP daemon is running then it’s time to dig deeper and see if the SNMP is responding to GET requests. Run the following snmpwalk command, the output should look similar to what’s shown below. Again, replace “public” with your actual SNMP community if you changed it.
pi@eventsentry-enviro:~ $ snmpwalk -v 2c -c public 127.0.0.1 1.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1
iso.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1.1.1 = INTEGER: 1
iso.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1.1.2 = INTEGER: 2
iso.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1.1.3 = INTEGER: 3
iso.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1.2.1 = STRING: "Temperature"
iso.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1.2.2 = STRING: "Humidity"
iso.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1.2.3 = STRING: "Light"
iso.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1.3.1 = INTEGER: 64
iso.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1.3.2 = INTEGER: 18
iso.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1.3.3 = INTEGER: 0
iso.3.6.1.4.1.21600.1.5.1.1.1.3.3 = No more variables left in this MIB View (It is past the end of the MIB tree)
SNMP works remotely
Since the Raspberry Pi does not have a firewall activated by default it’s unlikely that SNMP will work locally but not remotely. In any case, you can either run snmpwalk from a remote machine that has it installed, or use EventSentry to verify that the Raspberry Pi is accessible via SNMP.
Open the management console, selec the host entry for the Raspberry Pi, click “Check Status” followed by “Go” and review the results.
Anybody who’s looked for answers on the Internet has likely stumbled across a “TOP X LISTS”: The “10 things famous people do every day”, “Top 10 stocks to buy”, the “20 books you have to read” are just some examples of the myriad of lists that are out there offering answers. You may have even stumbled upon a few “Top 10 (or 12) Events To Monitor” articles too.
Why We Love Top 10 Lists and 10 Reasons Why We Love Making Lists provide some insight as to why these types of articles keep popping up all over the place for just about any topic. And it makes sense when you think about it! You’re facing a new problem/challenge you presumably know little about, get a “Hey, just do these 10 things!” list back and: Done.
But while “Top 10” lists are surely useful for a variety of topics (“Top 10 Causes of House Fires“), they are less useful when it comes to identifying event IDs to monitor. Why? Because auditing 10, 20 or even 30 events is just not enough to detect suspicious activity or help with forensics. Just consider that Windows 2019 potentially logs over 400 different events to the event logs – almost 3 x as many as Windows Server 2003 did. Sure, in practice Windows 2019 likely only logs some of these 400 events, but even a minimalist would probably agree that monitoring fewer than 10% of all events is probably not going to give you a whole lot of visibility into your network.
But before we go any further, let’s distinguish between auditing and monitoring. Enabling auditing tells a system to constantly create a trail of activity that can later be analyzed – either manually or by software. Monitoring on the other hand means that you’re actually doing something with those events – whether that’s storing them in a different location, analyzing them or getting email alerts.
But enabling auditing (correctly) is always the first step that any subsequent process builds on. And, enabling auditing is not only free but generally doesn’t impact system performance either (the only exception are large event logs that can affect memory usage).
Yet the sad reality is that many organizations out there are still not properly auditing their Windows servers. A system that’s not auditing its activity gives you neither the ability to respond to important events, nor does it let anyone retrace the steps of attackers after an intrusion has occurred (forensics). So let’s repeat: Regardless of whether you have a monitoring solution in place or not, or are planning on getting one, auditing should always be on and needs to be the first thing you do.
Auditing alone is, of course, no longer sufficient to maintain a secure network, and not only because clearing your event logs is one of the first thing intruders do after they attack. As the developers of EventSentry we’re obviously a little biased, but with proper event log monitoring in place, you can:
Store events in a secure location, safe from tampering & deletion
Correlate events across multiple hosts
Receive real-time alerts for critical events
Detect suspicious behavior
and more. So, whether you’re in charge of a grocery store in Idaho, a government contractor in Virginia or in charge of distributing oil for the Eastern U.S., the events below should always be monitored:
Now, going all out and monitoring 85 events as the baseline may seem crazy and overkill – after all you’ve never seen a “Eat these 85 foods to be healthy” list – but let’s remember the 4 reasons you should monitor these events:
You can never retroactively enable auditing. More is better.
Most of these 85 events log events infrequently.
Attackers don’t want you to enable auditing.
The Internet is crazy.
And just when you think you’re good, one needs to point out that even auditing these 85 events is not sufficient if you have to be compliant with regulations like CMMC, PCI and others (if you need to be compliant then I recommend our free validator here). And here are 3 great reasons those events are a good baseline:
They document changes made to the OS (e.g. scheduled task added)
They report a security issue (e.g. group membership changed)
They are logged infrequently and thus won’t spam your event log(s)
To activate these audit settings, either run the auditpol commands at the bottom of the list on all hosts or, a much better option, setup a group policy that will ensure these settings are always enforced across the entire domain/forest. The linked page includes instructions on how to import the necessary audit settings into a GPO, but here they are just in case:
Open the “Group Policy Management” application
Navigate to the “Group Policy Objects” container of the applicable domain
Right-click the container and add a new GPO object with a descriptive name (e.g. “Mandatory Auditing”)
Right-click the newly created GPO object and select “Import Settings”
Proceed with the wizard and point the “Backup Folder” path to the folder where the zip file was extracted to
The GPO object will now contain all audit policies for all events listed above
Link the GPO to the domain or select OUs
Larger networks may require different audit settings depending on server role, location and security level which may result in more complicated group policies. Remember that EventSentry can keep track of your audit policies to make sure your policies are accurate.
This latest update to EventSentry improves your security posture with validation scripts, simplifies IT troubleshooting for both administrators and users, gives you visibility into installed browser extensions along with many other usability improvements in the web reports.
Validation Scripts
Proactively identifying (potentially) malicious behavior is the cornerstone of any security defense, and a key feature of log management / SIEM solutions. But many security violations are the direct consequence of incorrect or missing settings on endpoints.
Traditional log management solutions may show you when something is happening that shouldn’t be happening, yes. But wouldn’t it be better to assess key OS components and security settings on a regular basis, and identify known weaknesses?
Consider a motion-triggered camera that will let you know when somebody is snooping around your property at 3AM in the morning. That camera is extremely important, and the foundation of any serious property security system – without it, you wouldn’t even know what was going on!
But wouldn’t it be even better if somebody was inspecting your windows, fence and locks on a regular basis, to let you know if a door or window was unlocked, or an insecure lock was being used at one of the entrances? If your overall perimeter was more secure in the first place, there would be fewer potential intrusion attempts.
And that’s exactly what EventSentry’s 60+ validation scripts do. Our managed security & health checks continuously compare critical settings on your monitored hosts with our baseline, immediately indicating potential risks. These checks identify a wide variety of potential risks, such as:
A Windows server/workstation is not on the latest patch
Windows firewall is disabled
No A/V software installed
Insecure TLS protocols are enabled
Microsoft accounts aren’t blocked
EventSentry already includes a number of features that help detect security violations, rogue network devices, unauthorized software, suspicious network activity and more. But by utilizing the new validation scripts, you can fix many problems at the source – before they show symptoms.
The scripts are managed by NETIKUS.NET, updated regularly, and can be downloaded through the management console with a single click. Validation scripts are also tagged with keywords such as #server #compliance #stig-high-server to make sure that only relevant checks are assigned.
Which Browser Extensions are lurking in your network?
While web browser extensions can boost productivity and excite your end users, they also have inherent privacy and security risks. All major web browsers let users install as many extensions as they wish by default – without restrictions!
But do you actually know how many Firefox, Chrome or Edge extensions are installed on browsers across your IT infrastructure?
As an “extension” (no pun intended) of EventSentry’s software monitoring component, all browser extensions of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) are inventoried with support for:
Alerts (extensions are installed/updated/uninstalled)
Searchable inventory
With this information at the fingertips, an initial discovery can be performed, a baseline set and reports or alerts can be received on a regular basis showing new extensions being installed.
Troubleshoot, Document & Support End Users with “EventSentray”
Supporting your end users has probably never been more challenging, considering they’re distributed all across the place and not conveniently squeezed into an office building anymore.
With the tray app “EventSentray”, your end users can submit support tickets to many common ticketing systems via email or HTTP requests right from the tray with a customizable link. And the best part? Support tickets created by the app not only include pertinent system information (current CPU %, host name, uptime, …) but can also include a current screenshot.
But we didn’t just design the tray app to give end users a way to submit support tickets right from their desktop, but also to help sysadmins.
Let’s be honest, when we log on to a server then it’s often because something isn’t working the way it should. Wouldn’t it be nice if one had easy access to information like:
CPU, Memory, Disk Usage & Utilization
Top 3 apps consuming CPU and memory
IP address, host name and connection speed
Whether the host needs a reboot
Simply double-clicking the EventSentry icon and the System Information dialog will show all of the above information – and more. Hovering over the charts will reveal additional hardware information as well.
And for those working in teams with shared responsibilities, right-clicking the tray app also lets you add notes (including a screenshot) for the monitored host. Those notes are then visible in the web reports and ensure that everyone on your team is on the same page when you make significant changes to a server or workstation. Documentation is key!
Tracking Administrator Activity
Many compliance frameworks require that you track activity by Administrators (e.g. Domain Admins) on your network. ADMonitor users now have the ability to filter all compliance reports (e.g. Logon Activity, Process Activity) to only show activity from users with domain admin privileges.
Dashboard Import / Export
To make setting up dashboards easier and faster, EventSentry now ships with a number of dashboard templates that you can import. You can also export your own dashboards and import them on another EventSentry installation.
Webcam & Image Dashboard Tiles
The latest edition of the web reports includes a number of dashboard improvements, but the new image / webcam tile type definitely sticks out.
With the new “Image” tile you can point the web reports to a static image or stream to be displayed on any dashboard!
When China built an entire emergency
hospital in a matter of days in Wuhan – a city about the size of NYC that most
of us had never heard of – the world was watching with concern, but somehow
still expected and hoped that the crisis would somehow remain contained to
China, or at least Asia. People in Europe and the U.S. continued to go on about
their busy lives, occasionally glancing at the headlines coming from China,
where the government was taking drastic measures to curtail the spread.
It now seems beyond naive, even
childish, to have thought that the virus wouldn’t spread to other parts of the
planet. The world we live in today, where between 8,000 and 20,000
planes fly across the sky every single day, is the perfect conductor for a
virus with an incubation period as high as two weeks. This gave the virus, which
had already started making its way through Wuhan and China back in December,
more than enough time to slowly travel to other countries on planes and ships.
Flights coming to and from Europe back in 2010
Fast forward two months, and what is
currently taking place in many parts of the world is something we would have
only expected from a fatalistic science fiction novel or cheesy Hollywood
movie: a stock market crash on par with that of October 1929,
a large percentage of planes grounded either due to government mandates or lack
of business, borders shut, and almost 200 million people – from democratic countries
nonetheless – under a curfew that will likely last weeks. Empty shelves in
grocery stores, abandoned playgrounds and formerly busy streets are now empty
resulting in thousands of closed restaurants and stores, some of them possibly
forever.
The picturesque town of Heiligenblut in Austria, currently under quarantine in March 2020
The current global crisis feels like
a medley of 9/11, the 2008 recession and then some. Yet it’s not due to a war
or natural disaster but because of the respiratory disease that goes by the
catchy name of “Covid19.” This disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2
virus that was at some point transmitted to humans from animals, as far as we
know from either bats, pangolins or a combination of the two (whatever happened
to eating tofu?).
What does all this have to do with
monitoring and network security?
But one country in Asia, located much closer to China than Italy and with a similar population density, has managed to avoid the disaster that is currently ravaging through Europe. That country is South Korea, where the number of new cases has slowed significantly since its peak at the end of February, without imposing curfews. South Korea has accomplished this with rigorous testing and isolation, including tracing contacts of infected people and quarantining them. Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong were similarly successful.
How did they do this? Data.
Since a large percentage of infected people show little to no symptoms –
particularly difficult to distinguish during flu season – the only way
to suppress the spread of the virus is to know who has the virus in the
first place. And then, once identified, immediately isolate the affected individuals
and people who had contact with them. If you wait until sick people show
up at the hospital, then you are already way behind the curve. For every person
that shows up at the hospital, you likely have twenty more walking around
infecting others.
Here at EventSentry we’re neither virologist nor pandemic experts. But
there are noticeable similarities between this outbreak and a
computer virus/malware infection. The purpose of monitoring after all is to be
aware of what is happening on the network so that organizations can take action
to stem the infection. You can only fight what you can see and measure.
Activity of a single user at a glance
The equivalent of Covid19 testing in
IT is monitoring. Monitoring only part of your infrastructure isn’t enough –
just like testing only 1% of the population isn’t sufficient. Yes, the infected
hosts will eventually reach the monitored ones, but at that point the majority
of your infrastructure may already have been compromised.
Many computer viruses, when
infecting a computer (host), first attempt to silently infect other hosts
before they do damage in one way or another. SARS-CoV-2 has similar
properties with an usually long incubation period. During that time, the host
is unaware that he or she is carrying the virus, potentially infecting others
through direct or indirect (e.g. surfaces like door knobs) transmission.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is quite sneaky
and would likely do well in the popular “Plague” game, where the
player creates a virus with the goal of infecting and ultimately killing the
entire world population. One of the most important properties of a virus in the
game is that it’s highly contagious but not too deadly – otherwise it would kill
all of its hosts before it can spread.
Thankfully, SARS-CoV-2 is neither as deadly nor contagious enough to accomplish this, yet it’s second only to the Spanish Flu that killed between 20-40 million people almost 100 years ago. See this article for more information on how Covid19 compares to past outbreaks.
Victims of the Spanish Flu in Kansas, 1918
Finding patient zero – the first person to have contracted a virus, is similar to finding the source of a malware outbreak. In medicine it may provide important clues on how to come up with a cure, whereas in IT security it can provide important information on how an attacker penetrated a network. Monitoring software like EventSentry doesn’t just detect problems in real time, it also collects troves of important logs and other system data that can be of incredible value after a network has been compromised. China is still desperately trying to find and confirm patient zero, who may have been infected as early as October 2019.
On our never-ending quest to slash cost in order to maximize profits, manufacturing of both medicine and medical supplies has been outsourced to China, India and other countries. While there is nothing wrong with saving costs and manufacturing items where it costs less, it’s clear that there is a benefit of manufacturing certain products in the country where they are being used.
Similarly, cost savings in IT budgets that compromise the overall security of the IT infrastructure and with it the company itself, rarely pay off in the long turn. As you can see from the matrix below, even a very unlikely circumstance that will have a significant impact on a business has a medium risk and should be addressed.
Risk Matrix
But in the midst of the all the
chaos and uncertainty, there also upsides. The severe reduction of air traffic
and travel give our planet a long overdue breather, as satellite images in Italy have shown. It’s also noteworthy that air pollution (and smoking) make
the lungs much more susceptible to respiratory diseases like Covid-19.
We need to remind ourselves that we’re not robots and machines but mammals that live on a planet shared with nature – animals – their viruses included. As we humans continue to encroach on their habitats and land, the risk of another deadly virus spreading doesn’t go away. Watch this short 5-year old video about bats and the viruses they carry.
For me it’s still difficult to comprehend that the current pandemic is connected to consuming bats, pangolins (most of which are endangered) and other wildlife. Some risks are just not worth taking, and it would be prudent of the Chinese government to permanently ban this obviously dangerous practice.
In the meantime people will need to continue to isolate, self-quarantine or shelter in place until the number of new cases continues to decline and toilet paper is available again.
To keep an eye on Covid-19 cases in your country and/or state with EventSentry (v4.1), you can follow the instructions in this HowTo and view Covid-19 stats in any dashboard or performance chart.
As an IT professional I encourage you to stay alert, as many bad actors are exploiting the current chaos with phishing campaigns for a variety of nefarious reasons. We highly encourage you to consider monitoring workstations and laptops with EventSentry to ensure you have complete visibility and prevent a bad situation from becoming worse, we are offering discounts on a case-by case basis. In addition to monitoring all the things you’re familiar with from your servers, EventSentry monitors laptop batteries, Bitlocker status, outdated software and more.
Thank you for being an EventSentry customer, stay safe and positive during this difficult time.
