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windows log through wincollect has extra text

  • 1.  windows log through wincollect has extra text

    Posted Wed August 03, 2022 04:22 AM

    Hi Community,

    Hope you all are doing well.

    From windows if you are collecting logs using wincollect a large number of the events have a sentence or two about the event itself at the end of the event. unnecessary and repetitive information and same message is always used for the same "EventCode" and Sometimes the extra text is quite long. 

    Is there any "feature" in wincollect with which we can turn off or stripping this extra information. 

    for example, every log with event id code 4624 contains below mentioned text that will be part of payload irrelevant of logon type triggered in the log: 

    "This event is generated when a logon session is created. It is generated on the computer that was accessed.  The subject fields indicate the account on the local system which requested the logon. This is most commonly a service such as the Server service, or a local process such as Winlogon.exe or Services.exe.  The logon type field indicates the kind of logon that occurred. The most common types are 2 (interactive) and 3 (network).  The New Logon fields indicate the account for whom the new logon was created, i.e. the account that was logged on.  The network fields indicate where a remote logon request originated. Workstation name is not always available and may be left blank in some cases.  The impersonation level field indicates the extent to which a process in the logon session can impersonate.  The authentication information fields provide detailed information about this specific logon request.  - Logon GUID is a unique identifier that can be used to correlate this event with a KDC event.  - Transited services indicate which intermediate services have participated in this logon request.  - Package name indicates which sub-protocol was used among the NTLM protocols.  - Key length indicates the length of the generated session key. This will be 0 if no session key was requested."

    I have raise a case with IBM but, though it would be great idea to open a discussion here on this portal as well.

    Regards,
    Rahul D



    ------------------------------
    rahul dhiman
    ------------------------------


  • 2.  RE: windows log through wincollect has extra text

    IBM Champion
    Posted Mon August 15, 2022 06:11 AM
    Rahul,
    interesting discussion as most users are looking for more than for less information :-)
    There is no"cut off" fearure in wincollect I am aware of . It might be doable if you change config values inside conf directory but I doubt this is a good idea.
    You can however filter off 4624 completely, but that isnt what you are lokking for. So my answer is no.
    PS what about defining an AQL search using you own event attributes and cutting off payload as needed?

    ------------------------------
    [Karl] [Jaeger] [Business Partner]
    [QRadar Specialist]
    [pro4bizz]
    [Karlsruhe] [Germany]
    [4972190981722]
    ------------------------------



  • 3.  RE: windows log through wincollect has extra text

    Posted Mon August 15, 2022 08:04 AM
    Thanks Karl, for your reply but this is something which is happening for the windows events and not just for event ID 4624.
    Also AQL will be of any help once the event is stored and you are searching for it but i am talking about clipping off any information when the event is being pulled from the server.

    something similar was discussed in below post as well








  • 4.  RE: windows log through wincollect has extra text

    IBM Champion
    Posted Thu August 18, 2022 09:04 AM
    Hi Rahul,

    if I understand correctly, it's about the windows security event logs. If at all possible, this would be a helpful tuning directly on the corresponding Windows machines for the security event log. Perhaps there is a switch in Windows to restrict this "info level" to an "audit level". And that would also reduce the payload size at the same time. That would indeed be a helpful microsoft security event log tuning..maybe in a future release?


    Regards,
    Ralph

    ------------------------------
    Ralph Belfiore
    SIEM Expert
    pro4bizz GmbH
    Karlsruhe
    +4972190981727
    ------------------------------



  • 5.  RE: windows log through wincollect has extra text

    Posted Wed September 14, 2022 03:28 AM
    Thanks Ralph for your feedback, will keep keep close watch on this.

    ------------------------------
    rahul dhiman
    ------------------------------



  • 6.  RE: windows log through wincollect has extra text

    Posted Mon August 22, 2022 04:45 AM
    Hi Rahul,
    using Wincollect i totally agree to what Karl and Ralph wrote. If you are not set to collecting the events with wincollect have a look into other collection clients. I lately started integrating logbeat/logtash and the configuration possibilities i saw so far should accomodate what you want to achive.

    ------------------------------
    Martin Schmitt
    ------------------------------



  • 7.  RE: windows log through wincollect has extra text

    Posted Mon August 22, 2022 05:18 AM
    Hi Martin,

    Thanks for your reply.

    Yeah, logstash has very good options for removing unwanted fields and information from the log.
    But I have never used logstash with Qradar. 
    so, have you installed logstash on Qradar ? I have recently started using ELK for the testing purpose so it would be great help if you can tell me how you are utilizing logstash with qradar.

    Regards,
    Rahul  





  • 8.  RE: windows log through wincollect has extra text

    Posted Mon August 22, 2022 09:23 AM
    Hi Rahul,
    logtash was installed on a seperate server. Nothing was installed on QRadar. I did not even configured something. One logsource, the logtash server was automatically discoverd as "Microsoft Windows Security Event Log" type .The events from the winlogbeat will be send to an elastic search data lake and will be imported with kafka and then send as syslog to qradar. So far we use the NSA Filter on logtash and have problems, because the events includes carrige returns \n and tabs \t. The Event IDs and categories are parsed correctly but a log of the rest looks a little funny. 
    The closest i could find as an guide was

    From <https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/dsm?topic=log-installing-winlogbeat-logstash-windows-host>

    Close because it assumes that winlogbeat sends the events directly from winlogbeat to Logtash. Maybe that is caused by the difference in the setup i use. Would be great if you share your experience and knowledge also. Especiallly if you have the problem with the extra symbols \t and \n as well and maybe a solution.
    Regards
    Martin

    ------------------------------
    Martin Schmitt
    ------------------------------



  • 9.  RE: windows log through wincollect has extra text

    Posted Tue August 23, 2022 02:12 AM
    Hi Martin,

    Thanks for your reply, this looks very helpful.
    I will test it out in some time and if I find something useful I will let you know.

    Regards,
    Rahul






  • 10.  RE: windows log through wincollect has extra text

    Posted Fri November 18, 2022 02:47 AM
    Hi,

    i implemented the above sucessfully.

    No change in the Setup: Windows Eventlogs via Windlogbeat to kafka Queue and then via Logstash to QRadar

    Filter function in Logtash in /etc/logstash/conf.d at the input


    filter {

      mutate {

        gsub => [

          "msg", "\n", " ",

          "msg", "\t", " "

        ]

      }

    }

    Output:

    output {

      tcp {

        host => "hostname.domainname.com"

        port => 514

        codec => "json_lines"

      }

    }


    Works perfect as far as i could check. 

    Have a great day and greetings from Austria

    Martin

    ------------------------------
    Martin Schmitt
    ------------------------------



  • 11.  RE: windows log through wincollect has extra text

    Posted Thu November 24, 2022 08:25 AM
    Hi Martin,

    Thanks for sharing this.

    To test out this one i would need to make changes in my lab as i am sending windows logs to qradar through wincolect in prod environment and for a couple of test machines i am shipping logs to elk through winlogbeat.
    So, basically I am having two different environments.

    Your setup looks interesting, may i know why you are not sending logs directly to qradar using wincollect and why are you using kafka queue in your setup.

    Rahul





  • 12.  RE: windows log through wincollect has extra text

    Posted Fri November 25, 2022 08:20 AM
    Hi Rahul,

    it is because the customer decided to have a big data lake for everything (performance, every log,...) which uses the kafka queues and to extract from that lake the security events for the SIEM.

    Regards,
    Martin

    ------------------------------
    Martin Schmitt
    ------------------------------