You may have heard about “Dirty Sock”, a recently discovered vulnerability targeting snapd sockets, playing on the name of a previous vulnerability called “Dirty Cow”. Snapd allows for the execution of packaged snaps, which are a mechanism to distribute and update applications in a standard format.
The Windows registry is full of information, and with the proper tools, can be a gold mine for attackers and defenders alike. Attackers look to find specific configurations, credentials, or any information that can help them further attack systems, while defenders can use the registry to ensure that settings are configured as they are expected to. This is something that is not always easy to do with standard tools in Windows, or with the right level of performance. Fortunately, osquery solves that for us.
I’m excited to share that we have just released free online training to introduce you to osquery. Our goal was to combine quick setup and hands on labs with complete accessibility, so that anyone who wanted to give osquery a try, could.
SQL (Structured Query Language) will be in its mid-forties later this month having been introduced by its creators Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce in the 1970s. Given its age, it isn’t so hard to understand how the 2017 Stack Overflow Developers Survey uncovered that SQL is the second-most common programming language, used by 50% of developers and beaten only by JavaScript.
![6 Tasks for Basic macOS system monitoring with osquery [Video]](https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/2617658/macos%20system%20monitoring%20with%20osquery%20shortcuts.png)
Osquery offers introspection capabilities for macOS that were previously difficult to achieve. Osquery uses a universal agent to collect and return a nearly unlimited amount of endpoint data that can then be queried like a database using SQL. For macOS system administrators, this opens up a world of quickly accessible system monitoring capabilities that we'll explore here today.
In this post and video (click here to skip ahead to the video), we'll review some of the basic tasks for macOS system monitoring with osquery (osquery can be used for Linux and Windows as well, but because macOS was previously so underserved, I'm focusing there. Most commands we'll review will be the same or similar for other systems).