The difficult part of the initial response to a human-operated ransomware attack is identifying the attack vector. You may already know from recent security incident trends that the vulnerabilities of VPN devices are likely to be exploited, but it often...

If you ever troubleshooted anything on Windows or investigated a suspicious event, you know that Windows store various types of events in Windows Event Log. An application crashed and you want to know more about it? Launch the Event Viewer and check the Application log. A service behaving strangely? See the System log. A user account got unexpectedly blocked? The Security log may reveal who or what blocked it.

All these events are getting stored to various logs through the Windows Event Log service. Unsurprisingly, this service's description says: "Stopping this service may compromise security and reliability of the system."

The Windows Event Log service performs many tasks. Not only is it responsible for writing events coming from various source to persistent file-based logs (residing in %SystemRoot%\System32\Winevt\Logs), it also provides structured access to these stored events through applications like Event Viewer. Furthermore, this service also performs "event forwarding" if you want your events sent to a central log repository like Splunk or Sumo Logic, an intrusion detection system or a SIEM server.

Therefore, Windows Event Log service plays an important role in many organizations' intrusion detection and forensic capabilities. And by extension, their compliance check boxes.

I stumbled upon an intriguing concept presented by Will Thomas (BushidoToken) in his blog post titled “Unmasking Ransomware Using Stylometric Analysis: Shadow, 8BASE, Rancoz.” This concept revolves around utilizing stylometry to identify potential modifications in new ransomware variants based on existing popular strains. If you’re interested, you can read the blog post here. (Notably, Will Thomas also appeared on Dark Net Diaries, discussing his tracking of the Revil ransomware.)

We’re happy to announce the public release of esmat, a new free & open-source tool. esmat is a command-line app for macOS that allows you to explore the behavior of Apple’s Endpoint Security framework.