ee-outliers

Framework to easily detect outliers in Elasticsearch events.

Developed in Python and fully dockerized!

Documentation

Introduction

• What is ee-outliers?
• Why ee-outliers?
• How it works

Using ee-outliers

• Getting started
• Configuration parameters
• Example use cases
• Building detection use cases
• Whitelisting outliers
• Notifications
• Information for developers

Misc.

• Contact
• Acknowledgements
• License
• Screenshots

What is ee-outliers?

ee-outliers is a framework to detect statistical outliers in events stored in an Elasticsearch cluster. It uses easy to write user-defined configuration files to decide which & how events should be analysed for outliers.

The framework was developed for the purpose of detecting anomalies in security events, however it could just as well be used for the detection of outliers in other data.

The only thing you need is Docker and an Elasticsearch cluster and you are ready to start your hunt for outlier events!

Why ee-outliers?

Although we love Elasticsearch, its search language is still lacking support for complex queries that allow for advanced analysis and detection of outliers - features we came to love while using other tools such as Splunk.

This framework tries to solve these limitations by allowing the user to write simple use cases that can help in spotting outliers in your data using statistical and models. Machine learning models are under development.

How it works

The framework makes use of statistical models that are easily defined by the user in a configuration file. In case the models detect an outlier, the relevant Elasticsearch events are enriched with additional outlier fields. These fields can then be dashboarded and visualized using the tools of your choice (Kibana or Grafana for example).

The possibilities of the type of anomalies you can spot using ee-outliers is virtually limitless. A few examples of types of outliers we have detected ourselves using ee-outliers during threat hunting activities include:

• Detect beaconing (DNS, TLS, HTTP, etc.)
• Detect geographical improbable activity
• Detect obfuscated & suspicious command execution
• Detect fileless malware execution
• Detect malicious authentication events
• Detect processes with suspicious outbound connectivity
• Detect malicious persistence mechanisms (scheduled tasks, auto-runs, etc.)
• …

Visit the page Getting started to get started with outlier detection in Elasticsearch yourself!

Contact

ee-outliers is developed & maintained by NVISO Labs.

You can reach out to the developers of ee-outliers by creating an issue in github.
For any other communication, you can reach out by sending us an e-mail at [email protected].

We write about our research on our blog: https://blog.nviso.eu
You can follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/NVISO_Labs

Thank you for using ee-outliers and we look forward to your feedback! 🐀

License

ee-outliers is released under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v3 (GPL-3). LICENSE

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the support received by INNOVIRIS and the Brussels region in funding our Research & Development activities.

Getting started →