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Julian Wayte, a senior security solutions engineer at Uptycs, provides perspective on osquery’s impact: “It just gives you so much visibility and protection. Osquery provides a clear view of all operating systems, ensuring all machines are set up and performing correctly. Many teams don’t know what machines make up their fleet, what programs are running, if configurations are correct, and if passwords are current. The most critical problem osquery solves for organizations is visibility across all systems and infrastructure. Osquery has many applications, but it does particularly well in the following areas. To read more about Cloud Security and Best Practices, check out our Cloud Security and Fundamentals eBook Other options for storage include security information and event management ( SIEM) systems (like Splunk), or security analytics platforms (like Uptycs) for threat intelligence, correlations, and anomaly detection. RocksDB works well as a temporary function, but it’s not a centralized, long-term data store. Some event-based data can be cached in RocksDB, which provides osquery users with a local, embedded storage option for fast, convenient data persistence. Osquery offers many choices, but the options aren’t so numerous when it comes to the storage of data. Smart organizations embrace osquery’s flexibility by customizing query packs to meet their specific needs. Built-in query packs aren’t updated often, so they’re best used as examples. Your team can choose from a list of built-in query packs covering commonly desired use cases like hardware monitoring, incident response, compliance, and macOS attacks. Packs include instructions about the frequency at which queries should run, and they focus on a specific subject of exploration or a particular problem.įor example, a compliance pack contains queries searching for systemic changes or anomalies concerning compliance. Query packs in osquery are what they sound like: collections of queries.
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The data generated by osqueryd queries can be invaluable in providing a snapshot of your operating system’s configuration, security posture, functioning, and overall condition. With osqueryd, logging is seamless, using an architecture plugin integrated into your organization’s log aggregation pipeline. This version effectively accumulates and logs query data that reflects systemic changes. With osqueryd, your team can schedule queries to run across your entire infrastructure. Osqueryd is a high-performance, low-footprint, host-monitoring daemon that drives insight by monitoring your infrastructure changes. You can use osqueryi to mock-up queries and begin exploring your operating system. This version can collect many types of information without running as root, uses an in-memory default database, and doesn’t connect or communicate with the osqueryd daemon. The interactive version of osquery, osqueryi, is a stand-alone console shell. Osquery uses SQL tables to represent abstract concepts such as running processes, loaded kernel modules, open network connections, browser plugins, hardware events, and file hashes. Your team can write SQL-based queries to explore data across all operating systems and infrastructure.
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The exciting news for users? With osquery, running queries no longer requires specialized expertise. Osquery simplifies the process of understanding your infrastructure by exposing an operating system as a high-performance relational database. It delivers a single-agent solution using a universal query language to collect rich datasets for multiple use cases. Osquery is an operating system instrumentation agent that provides a unique and refreshing approach to security. What if one data collection agent was lightweight, configurable, easily accessible, worked in all systems, and used a common language like SQL? No more struggling to standardize data between disparate systems or learning obscure languages to run your queries. Today’s organizations are overwhelmed with endpoint agent options, many of which hog resources, require complicated setup, use an esoteric language, and only work with one operating system. You’re probably well aware visibility depends on data-and this is where things can get complicated. Maintaining visibility into infrastructure and operating systems is critical for all organizations today-compliance, security, and your bottom line depend on it. Join us for 2 days of captivating content, hands-on learning, and fun with your fellow osquery community members. It’s back! ‘22: Risk Reduction for Modern Defenders will be happening in person at San Francisco’s Exploratorium on September 14 & 15.
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