Assets

In the context of IT and cyber infrastructure, an asset is any individual component or resource that is part or interact with the information technology system. These assets can vary widely and may include physical devices, software applications, data, virtual machines, network equipment, and more. Each asset plays a specific role in the functioning of the IT infrastructure and contributes to the overall network ecosystem.

Sekoia.io offers various features to manage your assets and use them to empower your detection and investigation scenarios. This documentation details these features.

Asset Management Empowers your SOC Team

Assets play a pivotal role in empowering your SOC team to effectively safeguard your organization's IT infrastructure from cyber threats and respond proactively to security incidents. The comprehensive understanding of assets offered by Sekoia.io enables your SOC team to gain vital visibility into the defended perimeter, monitoring all components with ease and precision.

By categorizing assets based on their criticality, Sekoia.io support the prioritization of all the alert management efforts and resources, focusing on protecting the most valuable elements and reducing overall risk exposure.

Furthermore, assets serve as the basis for threat detection and incident response. With knowledge of normal behavior patterns for each asset, SOC analysts can swiftly detect anomalies and deviations, alerting them to potential security threats. Armed with this information, you can take decisive actions by isolating affected assets and mitigating damage to prevent further compromise.

In alert investigations, assets serve as valuable reference points, allowing SOC analysts to trace attack paths, identify compromised assets, and assess the extent of a breach. This information guides effective mitigation and recovery strategies.

Classification of Assets

Categories and sub-categories

Sekoia.io supports three types of assets: Accounts, hosts and networks.

For each category, there are additional sub-categories to add an optional additional level of categorization:

Category	Sub-category
Account	User account, service account, machine account
Host	Desktop, server, mobile
Network	IPv4, IPv6

Criticality

The asset criticality value is a numerical indicator that represents the level of criticality or importance of each asset within the organization's IT infrastructure. It ranges from 0 to 100, where 0 indicates that the asset has no criticality or minimal importance, and 100 signifies maximum criticality, denoting assets crucial for the organization's operations.

This value contribues to the urgency score of alerts. Hence it plays a key role in computing and prioritizing alerts related to assets, ensuring that your SOC team focuses on addressing the most critical security incidents promptly.

Detection Properties

Asset matching and detection properties are fundamental features that enhance our system's event correlation and enrichment capabilities. Each asset type comes with a predefined set of detection properties that determine the criteria for matching incoming events with specific assets. When an event matches an asset based on these properties, the event is enriched with the asset UUID and inherits all the contextual properties associated with the asset, including its criticality and other relevant information.

Your SOC team can effectively correlate these events with specific assets through asset matching, enabling them to grasp the context and comprehend the potential impact on critical systems.

Contextual Properties

The contextual properties enhance asset management within our system by allowing users to associate additional context and metadata with each asset. These properties provide valuable information beyond the standard asset details, enabling better asset classification and enriched insights into the organization's IT infrastructure.

A contextual property is an additional attribute that can be assigned to an asset to provide more context and details about the asset. It can include any relevant information, such as names, labels, descriptions, categories, or custom identifiers.

Our asset management system comes with a default set of contextual properties tailored for each type of asset. Additionally, users have the flexibility to create custom contextual properties, allowing for the inclusion of specific details relevant to their organization's unique needs.

Best practices for your custom Contextual Properties

1. Consistency: Establish a consistent naming convention for your custom contextual properties to ensure clarity and ease of use across assets. Consider using predefined categories (e.g., "Location," "Owner," "Department") to maintain consistency.
2. Relevance: Only add contextual properties that provide meaningful information about the asset. Avoid including redundant or irrelevant details.
3. Data Accuracy: Regularly review and update contextual properties to ensure that they reflect the latest and most accurate information about your assets.
4. Security: Ensure that sensitive information is not exposed through contextual properties. Avoid using contextual properties to store confidential data such as passwords or financial information.
5. Integration: Leverage the power of contextual properties to integrate with other systems or modules, such as incident management, reporting, and compliance.

Your Asset Inventory

Your asset inventory refers to the comprehensive and up-to-date list of all the hosts, accounts and networks manually created, imported and automatically discovered from your organization's infrastructure.

Manual Asset Creation

To create an asset from our UI, you have to:

1. Click on Assets in the principal menu on the left
2. Click on the + New Asset button and selects the category of the asset you want to create,
3. Give it a name and mark it as reviewed if you believe your new asset is qualified
4. Determine its sub-category
5. Define a set of optional tags you want to attach to your asset
6. Give it a description along with all the Contextual Properties you want
7. Don't forget to define its criticality
8. Define all the Detection Properties that will be used to recognize the asset among your events

Automatic Asset Discovery

In Sekoia.io, Asset Discovery is the live process of passively finding and consolidating assets from your events.

It is based on the idea that events contain two kinds of fields :

• fields that denote what happened (e.g., a failed SSH authentication)
• fields that denote what resources were involved (e.g. user, the computer, the remote SSH server, the eventual proxy or gateway between them, etc). While these resources likely represent assets within or outside the scope of your organization, those fields are rarely trivial identifiers of them. Instead, they come as markers, traces, fingerprints, such as IP addresses, FQDNs, emails, UserAgents, etc.

In Sekoia.io, event field values that implicitly map to an asset are called “atoms”.

What is an Atom?

Atoms are unambiguous but non-trivial identifiers of real world assets.

An asset can be associated with various atoms (e.g., bound IP addresses and hostnames for machines, usernames and emails for users). However, each atom uniquely identifies only one asset without any ambiguity at a specific time for a given entity. For instance:

• Atom 192.168.1.2 maps to asset DESKTOP-123 in entity DMZ-1 of community MyCommunity on 01/01/2023
• Windows XP is not an atom: one doesn’t uniquely identify a computer using its Operating System. Here, Windows XP is rather a contextual property.

Some atoms are considered exclusive identifiers. For example, the Windows SID of an Active Directory user is known to be unique. In the same Active Directory, there is no user with two different SIDs.

Although these assets are not yet fully qualified, tracking atoms is still valuable and allowed in Sekoia.io:

• Attachments of atoms to assets is kept in timeline. Events that mutate the structure of an asset, such as DHCP lease renewals that attach and detach IP addresses to hosts, are therefore accessible to the user and can be used to time-travel the whole network graph for historical investigation purposes
• Behavioral activity is tracked at the atom level. For instance, even if 192.168.1.2 is associated with various assets over time, events related to this IP address are linked to that specific atom. The weekly activity of a selected atom may be seen in Sekoia.io asset details page.

Atoms may be seen as the Operation Center equivalent of observables in the Intelligence Center. Although very similar, those concepts have been worded differently because observables in an threat-intelligence context may be understood as external indicators candidate to be tagged as Indicators of Compromise (IoC). Atoms primarily serve as internal observables, specifically related to the supervised network, rather than functioning as global threat-intelligence objects.

Tracked Atoms and their related event fields

The following table lists the atom types and their related event fields that are currently tracked by Sekoia.io:

Atom type	Related event fields
IPv4	client.ip, destination.ip, host.ip, server.ip, source.ip, related.ip
IPv6	client.ip, destination.ip, host.ip, server.ip, source.ip, related.ip
Hostname	host.name, host.hostname, related.host, client.name, server.name, log.hostname
fqdn	dns.question.name, client.domain, client.registered_domain, destination.domain, destination.registered_domain, source.domain, source.registered_domain, server.domain, server.registered_domain, tls.client.x509.alternative_names, url.domain, url.registered_domain, x509.subject.common_name, x509.alternative_names, user.domain, related.host
username	user.name, user.full_name, related.user, client.user.name
email	client.user.email, destination.user.email, file.x509.alternative_names, host.user.email, server.user.email, source.user.email, tls.client.x509.alternative_names,user.email, user.changes.email, user.effective.email, user.target.email, x509.alternative_names, email.from.address, email.to.address
sid	user.id, related.user, client.user.id

Asset Discovery Rules

Attach Operating System (OS) to Host

Set the Contextual Property os to Host

This rule enriches an existing asset with an os contextual property. This property is extracted from the value of all the os related fields of an event where its host.name field matches the hostname detection property of the asset. In addition, this rule categorizes the asset as a Server if the host.type contains server.

Discover unique Hosts

This rule creates a new asset for every unseen host.name. It attaches the ipv4 and ipv6 stored in field host.ip of the event as detection properties of the newly created asset.

Discover unique Accounts

This rule creates a new asset for every unseen user.name. It attaches the user.email and user.id event field values as detection property of the newly created asset.

Questions? Please read our FAQ.

Asset based detections

The Sekoia.io SOC platform supports the creation of detection patterns for rules or alert-filters that can be customized to apply to specific groups of assets. This feature allows you to enhance the scope of detection by targeting groups of assets that share certain attributes, such as critical servers, or by tuning the detection rules to exclude certain assets, like administrator accounts. This is accomplished by leveraging various asset attributes, as detailed below.

Asset fields

The following table lists the available fields for defining asset-based detection patterns, along with their types and example values:

Field	Type	Example Value
sekoiaio.any_asset.tags	Set of Strings	{"VIP", "critical", "internal"}
sekoiaio.any_asset.uuid	Set of Strings	{NETWORK_UUID, ENTITYLESS_HOST, USER_UUID, ENTITYSPECIFIC_HOST}
sekoiaio.any_asset.name	Set of Strings	"My asset"
sekoiaio.any_asset.criticality_display	Set of Strings	{"high", "low"}
sekoiaio.any_asset.criticality_value	Set of Integers	{80, 0}

Warning

Some of the fields listed above are removed from the events before indexing them, but they can be used in detection and filtering patterns. Indexed events will thus only contain sekoia.assets.*.uuid, sekoia.assets.*.name, sekoia.assets.*.criticality_value, sekoia.any_asset.uuid, sekoia.any_asset.name and sekoia.any_asset.criticality_value.

Use Case Example

To demonstrate the capabilities of asset-based detections, consider the following use case. You can create custom tags and apply them to a list of assets manually or by using a script and available APIs. Once tagged, these assets can be used in detection rules or alert filters to fine-tune the detection scope.

Example 1: Detection Rule

The following Sigma pattern demonstrates how to create a detection rule that targets assets tagged with "my_custom_tag_for_critical_servers":

detection:
  selection:
    event.code: 4720
    sekoiaio.any_asset.tags: "my_custom_tag_for_critical_servers"

  condition: selection

Example 2: Alert Filter

The following Sigma pattern demonstrates how to create an alert filter that excludes assets tagged with "my_custom_tag_for_admin_assets":

detection:
  selection:
    sekoiaio.any_asset.tags: "my_custom_tag_for_admin_assets"

  condition: selection

By using custom tags, you can precisely control which assets are included in or excluded from your detection rules, ensuring a more targeted and effective threat detection strategy. For more information on how to tag assets using the Sekoia.io API, refer to the API documentation.

!!! Note
There is no need to add the `contains` modifier when referring to a tag. Because the `sekoiaio.any_asset.tags` field is a list, `sekoiaio.any_asset.tags: mytag` already means "match if any of the tags is mytag".

Asset Based Investigation

In addition to their role in managing security risks, assets in Sekoia.io support investigation based on analytics on their past behaviors. By analyzing asset activity and behavior patterns, you can identify potential patterns of malicious activity or security breaches. This information can be used to investigate and identify potential security risks.

The asset investigation feature provides a detailed view of an asset's history, including past events for a specific set of activities. This allows you to quickly identify any unusual activity and take appropriate action.

Authentications

Authentications are an essential part of securing a perimeter. Analyzing all the authentications of an asset provides a comprehensive view of its security posture. In this view, the user can easily spot all the authentications of an asset.

An authentication is denoted by the following properties:

• Time of first occurrence: The exact time when the authentication was first recorded.
• Number of occurrences: The total number of times the authentication occurred.
• Source host: The host from which the authentication attempt originated.
• Target host: The host that was the target of the authentication attempt.
• Source account: The account that initiated the authentication attempt.
• Target account: The account that was the target of the authentication attempt.
• Service/Process: The service or process involved in the authentication.
• Authentication status: The result of the authentication attempt (e.g., success or failure).

This page also shows the trend of the top 10 target accounts of the authentication on the current asset along with the top 5 source hosts. This visual representation helps in quickly identifying patterns and potential security issues.

By leveraging this detailed authentication data, users can enhance their understanding of the asset's security posture and take proactive measures to mitigate potential security threats.

Pivoting for Detailed Investigation

Each entry in the authentication logs supports pivoting to the detailed view of the source and target hosts and accounts.

This feature allows users to dive deeper into the specifics of each authentication attempt, facilitating thorough investigation and analysis. Here's how it can be used:

• Source Host Pivot: Clicking on a source host in the authentication log will take you to a detailed page about that specific source host. This page include information such as:
• Historical activity of the source host.

• Other assets or accounts the source host has interacted with.

• Target Host Pivot: Similarly, clicking on a target host will navigate to a detailed page about that target host. This page may include:

• Comprehensive logs of all activities involving the target host.
• Security posture and any past incidents involving the target host.

• Relationships with other assets or accounts.

• Source Account Pivot: Clicking on a source account will provide detailed information about that account, including:

• The account's activity history across various assets.
• Authentication attempts made by the account.

• Any security incidents or breaches involving the account.

• Target Account Pivot: Clicking on a target account will reveal detailed information, such as:

• The account's interaction history.
• Any security incidents or breaches involving the account.
• The account's access permissions and any recent changes.