Suricata Log Monitoring

Integration Overview

Suricata is both an intrusion detection system (IDS) and intrusion prevention system (IPS) used for network security monitoring. Panther can collect, normalize, and monitor Suricata audit logs to help you identify suspicious network activity in real time. Your normalized log data is then retained to power future security investigations in a data lake powered by the cloud-native data platform, Snowflake.

Use Cases for Suricata Audit Logs

Panther supports the easy ingestion of a variety of Suricata log types, including Alert, Anomaly, DHCP, DNS, FileInfo, Flow, HTTP, SSH, and TLS. Some common security use cases for Suricata logs include monitoring for:

  • Identify lookups to suspicious domains that could indicate a phishing attack
  • Monitor traffic on remote access services like SSH, RDP, and more
  • Inspect blocked domains

Onboarding Suricata Logs in Panther

Panther supports ingesting Suricata logs via common Data Transport options: Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, SQS, and CloudWatch. Setting Suricata up in Panther is fast and easy - you simply need to create a new Suricata log source within the Panther console, choose your preferred data transport method, and configure Suricata to push logs to your data transport source.

For more details on onboarding Suricata logs or for supported log schema, you can view our Suricata documentation here.

Parsing, Normalizing, & Analyzing

As Panther ingests Suricata logs, they are parsed, normalized, and stored in a Snowflake security data lake. This allows you to write detections, identify anomalies, and conduct investigations in the context of days, weeks, or months of data.

Panther applies normalization fields to log records, which standardizes names for attributes and enables you to correlate data across all of your log sources. Panther’s handy search tools - such as Query Builder, Data Explorer, and Indicator Search - allow you to investigate your normalized logs for suspicious activity or vulnerabilities. For more information on searching logs, check out our documentation on Investigations & Search.

Detection as Code

With Panther, you aren’t confined to restrictive detections or proprietary languages as seen in many SIEM solutions. Panther is built around detection-as-code principles, giving you the ability to write Python to define detection logic and to integrate external systems like version control and CI/CD pipelines into your detection engineering processes. This results in powerful, flexible, and reusable scripting of detections for your security team.

Pre-built detections for Suricata are available by default in Panther, offering you the ability to immediately monitor for common IoCs and threats. You can explore our built-in detection coverage for Suricata audit logs here.

Configuring Alerts

Panther generates alerts when your detection rules or policies for Suricata are triggered, and integrates with a variety of alert destinations to allow for intuitive management of any alerts. Alerts can also be sent to alert context or SOAR platforms for more remediation options.

Alerts are categorized by five different severity levels: Info, Low, Medium, High, and Critical. Your security team has the ability to dynamically assign severity based on specific log event attributes.

Customer Support

If you have any questions about onboarding or monitoring Suricata logs in Panther, our customer support team is here to help. All customers have access to support via a dedicated Slack channel, email, or in-app messenger.

You can view our documentation on configuring and monitoring Suricata logs here, or customers can sign up for the Panther Community to share best practices or custom detections for Suricata logs.

The Ideal SIEM for Suricata

With Panther, your team doesn’t have to pay excessive costs to keep up with the growth of cloud app data, waste time and resources on operational overhead, or struggle with restrictive detection logic. Panther was founded by a team of security engineers who struggled with other SIEM solutions first-hand, and built an intuitive, cloud-native platform to solve them.

Panther is a cloud-native SIEM built for security operations at scale, offering flexible detection-as-code, intuitive security workflows, and actionable real-time alerts. For a powerful, practical, and scalable SIEM solution for Suricata, request a demo today.

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