In this blog post I’ll cover osquery’s ability to provide performant behavior and its capabilities to excel at enterprise grade requirements. Many observations covered in this blog will highlight various capabilities of osquery that should aid in your journey toward an enterprise-grade osquery deployment.

Osquery has become a popular source of instrumentation for a wide variety of use cases. On github security showcase, it is currently among the top most popular open source security projects. Given the popularity, a recurring question is what use cases can one address with osquery in an enterprise environment?

Many systems make installing 3rd party software incredibly convenient; from packaging systems and well loved Linux distribution tools like Debian Apt to app stores and per-language repositories. Users are also often allowed to install browser extensions or plugins, which come from their own “store” and are just another type of software. For these reasons, and without forgetting containers, maintaining a software inventory that allows you to identify dangerous packages has become harder to do, but more critical to accomplish.

This video features Pat Haley, our Principal Sales Engineer, walking through the strengths and challenges of osquery, how osquery can be used for incident investigations, and how Uptycs can add value to an osquery deployment of any size.

Kathy Wang, GitLab’s Sr. Director of Security, and Philippe Lafoucrière, a distinguished GitLab Engineer, recently presented “Towards Zero Trust at GitLab.com” at Google’s Cloud Next ‘19 event.

As a part of a pretty crazy week (Microsoft/RDS, Apple/Mojave/High Sierra, Adobe Acrobat/ Flash Player) when it comes to security updates, some new speculative execution vulnerabilities were disclosed and fixed.

[Updated June 5th] Patching for the CVE (CVE-2019-0708) vulnerability (referred to as BlueKeep) appears to have been slow, according to Rob Graham among others. One security expert, Ryan McGeehan (@Magoo), with experience in modeling vulnerability exploit probability and has done just that with the BlueKeep security flaw. 

His concerning summary concludes:

"Chances are about even ( 47.62%)  for “in the wild” BlueKeep exploitation to be observed between now and end of June."

Follow the outline below to check your exposure using osquery.

Microsoft released an important patch to the remotely exploitable Remote Desktop Services (RDS) vulnerability. This vulnerability does not require any authentication and allows an attacker to run code remotely. Expect public exploits to start appearing soon.

This previous blog post explored ways to use osquery for macOS malware analysis. Using the same methodology introduced there, we analyzed five additional macOS malware variants and recorded their behavior to understand the techniques they used. Below, you’ll find the techniques used by Calisto, Dummy, HiddenLotus, LamePyre and WireLurker. Read on to explore how to translate the techniques used by these malware into queries you can run to hunt for the active presence or historical artifacts using osquery.

Progress in open source projects thrives on the sharing of information. Yet even with the best of intentions, much of the learning can still be considered tribal knowledge, traded between small groups of closely connected individuals. While, the osquery project certainly isn’t immune to this, the community has absolutely benefited from a passionate and growing base of users, developers, contributors and tinkerers that are dedicated to documenting and sharing what they’ve learned.

Osquery, at its most basic level, is an operating system instrumentation framework that exposes the OS as a SQL database. SQL queries can be run to view information about the systems similar to any SQL database, providing a unified cross platform framework (i.e. endpoints running on multiple operating systems can be queried using the industry standard database language: SQL. This structured approach for collecting and accessing data introduces great flexibility, making it useful for multiple purposes. For example, queries can be constructed to audit infrastructure for compliance, vulnerabilities, malware analysis and intrusion detection, etc. Data collected by osquery can be useful to anybody from IT support teams to CSIRTs. However, in this blog post we’ll narrow our focus and explore how to use osquery specifically for macOS malware analysis (though the methodologies discussed are the same for Windows and Linux operating systems).