GRR Rapid Response alternatives

MIG provides a platform to perform investigative analysis on remote systems. By using the right queries, information can be obtained from these systems. This all happens in parallel, making intrusion detection, investigation, and follow-up easier.

The Sleuth Kit is a forensics tool to analyze volume and file system data on disk images. With its modular design, it can be used to carve out the right data, find evidence, and use it for digital forensics.

Volatility is a well-known tool to analyze memory dumps. Interesting about this project is that the founders of this project decided to create a foundation around the project. This foundation is an independent 501(c) (3) non-profit organization that maintains and promotes open source memory forensics with The Volatility Framework.

Bitscout contains a set of popular tools to acquire and analyze disk images onsite. It saves engineers from traveling to the physical location. In other words, it is providing the option to do remote forensics. The project claims that everything is correctly implemented when it comes to digital forensics. One of these requirements is that no data is altered. For example, the remote security professional can obtain a disk image clone, but not alter the machine state.

This toolkit of scripts are made by Hal to help in forensic assignments. They make several parts of the job easier, like converting data to another format for further processing.

The libewf toolkit is useful for those who need to create a disk image or perform disk forensics.

Radare2 is a popular framework to perform reverse engineering on many different file types. It can be used to analyze malware, firmware, or any other type of binary files. Besides reverse engineering, it can be used for forensics on filesystems and do data carving. Tasks can be scripted and support languages like JavaScript, Go, and Python. Even software exploitation is one of the functions it can be used in.

Acra is a database encryption proxy that provides encryption and data leakage prevention to applications. It provides selective encryption, access control, database and data leak prevention, and even intrusion detection capabilities. It is focused on developers and supports most popular programming languages such as Go, PHP, Python, Ruby.

LogonTracer is a tool to investigate malicious logins from Windows event logs with visualization capabilities.

Both Radare2 and Frida have their own area of expertise. This project combines both, to allow a more extensive analysis of files and processes.

Typically this tool will be used to gather information from a compromised system or to track traces from a system to find evidence. Shellbags can provide some insight on browsed directories on the system via Explorer on Microsoft Windows systems.

DejaVu is an open source deception framework which can be used to deploy and administer decoys or canaries across a network infrastructure. Defenders can use deception as a technique to learn quickly about possible attackers on the network and take actions.

TheHive is scalable and a complete platform to deal with security incidents. It allows for collaboration between those responsible for dealing with such incidents and related events. It can even use the data of the MISP project, making it easier to start analyzing from there.

The main purpose to use HELK is to do analytic research on data, which are typically the events coming from your systems. Suspicious events could be discovered by doing so-called threat hunting. It may give additional insights about the existing infrastructure and required security defenses.

Rastrea2r is a threat hunting utility for indicators of compromise (IOC). It is named after the Spanish word rastreador, which means hunter. This multi-platform open source tool helps incident responders and SOC analysts to triage suspected systems. The hunt for IOCs can be achieved in just a matter of a few minutes.

ThreatPinch helps to speed up collecting information from common resources like CVE databases or public WHOIS data. As it works from the browser, it is a helpful addition for people who have to perform forensics, security monitoring, or system administration. For example, getting the owner of a domain and IP address becomes almost instant knowledge.

OSSEC uses a centralized, cross-platform architecture allowing multiple systems to be monitored and managed.

Highlights:
The OSSEC project was acquired by Third Brigade, Inc in June 2008. This included the copyrights owned by Daniel Cid, its project leader. They promised to continue the development, keep it open source, and extend commercial support and training to the community.

Trend Micro acquired Third Brigade in May 2009. This included the OSSEC project. Trend Micro promised to keep the software open source and free.

Samhain is a host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS). It provides file integrity checking and log file monitoring/analysis. Additional features are rootkit detection, port monitoring, detection of rogue SUID executables, and the detection of hidden processes.

Samhain is typically deployed as a standalone application, although it supports centralized logging. This makes it ideal for environments with multiple systems.

Samhain is open source software and written by Rainer Wichmann.

Besides intrusion detection, Snort has the capabilities to prevent attacks. By taking a particular action based on traffic patterns, it can become an intrusion prevention system (IPS).

Zeek helps to perform security monitoring by looking into the network's activity. It can find suspicious data streams. Based on the data, it alert, react, and integrate with other tools.

Suricata is a somewhat younger NIDS, though has a rapid development cycle. It can work with Snort rulesets, yet also has optimized rulesets for usage with Suricata itself. For example, this set is known as Emerging Threats and fully optimized.