I could see where a SIM product, in particular CSMARS but any that
supports event correlation, could certainly give the impression of
reducing false positives. If you configure a CSMARS with default rules to
collect events from an unconfigured, noisy Cisco IDS sensor...and only pay
attention to what the CSMARS considers an "incident", you'll only see a
subset of the actual events that fired on the sensor. I'm sure that makes
some people happy;-) It doesn't help that CSMARS fails to parse numerous
Cisco IDS events entirely (well deserved stab at Cisco for making me open
SEPARATE TICKETS for each signature the CSMARS fails to parse). Bottom
line is that both your IDS and your SIM need considerable configuration to
be useful. This is as good a place as any to mention that getting your
host logs into the SIM is infinitely more valuable that those mostly bogus
IDS events.
On the subject of SIMs and vulnerability analysis scans...has anyone
actually found this feature to be useful?
1) I can't even imaging letting my SIM scan the network in such an adhoc
manner. It doesn't help that none of the vendors seem to bother with
providing much in the way of documentation of the process. I'm in a wacky
world where an outtage is almost never trivial;-) I've used Nessus enough
to know that it WILL eventually cause an outtage.
2) I don't see how it would be helpful. The CSMARS is updated like once
every 2 months. I would personally prefer something a little
"lighter"...like an nmap OS ident or similar.
-----Original Message-----
From: Joel M Snyder [mailto:Joel.Snyder@Opus1.COM]
Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2005 10:03 AM
To: focus-ids@securityfocus.com
Subject: Re: Tuning false positives
Gary Halleen (ghalleen) <ghalleen@cisco.com> wrote:
Before I catch too many flames, let me clarify that I recommend a good
SIM product, of which MARS is one.
Hmmm, speaking of flames... not sure that I would necessarily agree that
MARS is even a SIM product at all, depending on your definition of SIM,
but in any case rather than flame in public, I'll pitch out:
http://infosecuritymag.techtarget.com/ss/0,295796,sid6_iss506_art1043,00.html
which is a test I did of five SIMs late last year.
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