I rank OSSEC as one of my favorite pieces of open source software, and finally decided to play around with it more in my own free time. (Yup, I do this sort of stuff for fun). My goal was quite simple: send syslog packets from my Cisco to my “proxy” server, running OSSEC. I found that, although OSSEC supports Cisco IOS logging, it didn’t really work. In fact, I couldn’t find any examples or articles of anybody actually getting it to work.

I really like using PSAD, both on my server and my laptop. You never know where the mean people are. I also seem to use syslog-ng quite often, meanwhile PSAD seems oriented to syslog. This is fine, and I’m pretty sure the install.pl for the source built will configure syslog-ng.conf automatically. However, I almost always tend to stick with packages if I can – if they are even remotely close to the current version. Anyways, if you need to get syslog-ng.conf configured for PSAD, this is what you need to do: Add this code to the “# pipes” section, maybe stick to keeping it alphabetical.

I love my Snort, I really do. But sometimes, I just don’t need all the extra overhead – sometimes the resources on a server are somewhat, limited. Looking for a solution I stumbled upon PSAD , a way to detect port scans. Since port scans are often one of the first tactics used to find vulnerabilities on a server, it is a pretty good idea to detect them. Depending on the attack, I receive a nice little email telling me what is going on. To test it out I first fired up nmap, and received a few emails. Next I fired up nessus with updated plugins – you can be the judge. I now have 50 emails from myself telling me somebody is doing something naughty: