Uptycs Blog

We are asked quite often if deploying the osquery agent is possible via Windows Group Policy Objects (GPOs). 

The Uptycs Threat Intelligence team is responsible for providing a high quality, curated, and current Threat Intelligence feed to the Uptycs product. In order to deliver the threat feed, the team evaluates every single alert that is seen by our customers, and investigates the alert as feedback into the threat feed curation process. Recently we observed a malicious domain alert from a customer. The out-of-the-box alert description indicated that it belonged to the OSX/Shlayer malware family. We were quickly able to query Uptycs threat intelligence to find that the domain first appeared on February, 2019 and was reported by multiple threat intel sources. Once the threat was validated, we dove into deeper investigation to understand the threat surface and risk. This post walks through the steps and techniques we performed to analyze data that had been collected via osquery, and aggregated in Uptycs.

Osquery has become a popular tooling for endpoint-based security analytics. The user community is thriving and vibrant as reflected in GitHub security showcase and osquery slack channel activity. There are many organizations, large and small, who are using it for a wide-variety of use cases. There are anecdotal references to organizations such as Facebook, Google and others using it at very large scale to get security visibility.

Be it for macOS or my dog eating out of the trash, there is no such thing as a bullet-proof security policy. It’s all about creating a threshold of standards- something to work off of while simultaneously reducing overall risk (you know, like storing your trash can on the counter, for example).

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?