Guest Blogger: Junaid Arshad Malik 

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) networks are in a very precarious state in the existing digital ecosystem. These networks have ceased to be mere small fish to cybercriminals; they are soft jumps, convenient points of entry to bigger supply chains or malware experimental grounds. Where large enterprises are hardening their border with multi-million-dollar Security Operations Centers (SOCs), SMEs usually find themselves empty-handed when it comes to processing logs, and many of them do not have the funds or technical expertise to implement complicated protection structures. Defense disparity is a matter of context rather than a budget matter. In cases where a firewall transfers a connection to an IP unknown, a resource-constrained IT administrator is frequently not smart enough to determine whether it is a benign update or a Command and Control (C2) call. The post presented in this blog discusses a transformational concept that can fill this gap: The combination of Digital Forensics and Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT).

The Idea: Placing the Crime Scene into Perspective.

The suggested framework will change the paradigm of passive logging to active intelligence. Historically, digital forensics has been a post attack activity searching through evidence having been destroyed by a calamity. New strategy is a union of internal forensic information and external foreign intelligence.

Its idea is elegant in its simplicity:

1. Extract: Lightweight versions of these tools such as Sysmon and RegShot gather internal fingerprints such as file hashes, registry keys, and connections to networks.
2. Enrich: These artifacts are immediately checked against the global threat databases such as VirusTotal and AbuseIPDB.
3. Feature: The system matches the local data with global threat actors, and it can immediately not only determine that a breach is taking place, but it knows who is likely to be behind it.

Feasibility: High Impact and Low Barrier:

In the case of SMEs, the security solution will be viable depending on the Return on Security Investment (ROSI). This OSINT-enhanced system is particularly successful in this aspect since it uses open-source and free tools instead of a balance of affordable proprietary equipment.

It is made lightweight and can be run on typical consumer-level hardware commonly available in most SOHO settings. The framework lowers the number of man hours that the IT personnel would be needed to accomplish the correlation of logs with external APIs automatically and effectively, other words, it outsources the threat intelligence to the rest of the world without the enterprise price tag.

Critical View: Pros and Cons

The Pros:

1. Precision Detection: When using live malware like RedLine Stealer, this integration demonstrated a 100% malicious hash hit, so effective triage does not need any costly software. With the detection of malware appropriate defensive measures were applied quickly.
2. Rapid Attribution: It goes even more, attributing attacks to campaigns or botnets which is essential in risk perception.
3. Fighting Alert Fatigue: With the help of reputation engines, the system sifts the logs within its internal systems to remove noise, leaving small teams with only high-confidence threats.
4. Cost: Only a single admin or IT guy is needed to manage the process and the process itself costs 0$ if configured correctly one time and made into a pipeline of continuous extract and examination.

The Cons:

1. Reactive Nature: It is mostly a post-compromise structure. It is best at identifying and comprehending a breach which has already begun, although it is not an alternative to real-time prevention, such as firewalls. But as alternative and cost effective it can help enrich CTI platforms with new types of attacks so professionals can find solutions which can be applied while under attack.
2. Privacy Concerns: When asking for publicly available databases to return search results based on the internal file hash or an IP address, one must ensure that the data is minimized to prevent accidental spillage of company secrets.

Conclusion:

Gone are the days of security by obscurity. Due to the automation of attacks by threat actors, defenders must automate their intelligence. With a combination of forensic and OSINT feeds, we will be able to make SOHO networks capable of producing the so-called actionable intelligence, which will help them react to an incident with certainty.

Author Details:

Junaid Arshad Malik

Cybersecurity Analyst (DFIR | Penetration Testing)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/junaid-arshad-malik-644b11291/

Back Story:

This was an idea which I used in a thesis I did for a client from a University in the UK. I implemented the idea locally and made an actionable pipeline for OSINT automation. But the Forensic part was done manually with multiple tools to get the complete image of system compromise.

Tools I Used: All Opensource all Free.

1. Sysmon
2. RegShot
3. Wireshark
4. Autoruns
5. TCPView
6. Strings
7. Hash

Future work is aimed at addressing fileless malwares in attacks and moving on full memory captures utilizing tools like (Magnet Ram Capture, FTK Imager, Autopsy). Doing a full post attack analysis to get detailed insights into attacks and their origins.