This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

What do you do when an attempt to communicate with a botnet is detected?

I'm curious about what the best course of action is. One of the XG Firewalls we manage detected an attempt to communicate with a botnet. The policy is set to Log and Drop and the alert itself says "no further action is needed", but why not? I don't think we just want to log and drop this, do we?

Don't we also want to find out what's going on with the device that triggered this?

What are other people doing when they get these alerts?

I can run an additional virus scan with Malwarebytes. I can run a manual scan with Sophos Endpoint protection. I can check to see what programs are installed...

Does anyone have any other recommendations? Ideally I can come up with a procedure to follow whenever we get one of these alerts.



This thread was automatically locked due to age.
Parents Reply
  • I am talking about the future of Threat Hunting. That is the main goal of a security product to begin with. You want to address complex attack scenarios and want to fight back. Looking at a firewall log only is only a small field of actual "what happen here?". 

    Looking at the current state of attacks (See MITRE), you can easily spot the issue, only on relaying on a firewall. The firewall can only give you a small view of the actual attack, while getting more intel of your entire network is the key to fight back. 

    I am not saying, the current state of logging is the best, it still get more detail to it (Logviewer improvements etc.). What i am saying is, reporting is not logging. Central is a reporting platform. Its about getting intel of what is going on. 

    Just some thoughts for the future. 

    __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Children
  • fair enough, valid points and appreciate from what I've read from you in this forum in the past you know your onions. (know what you're talking about).

    Cheers

    ------------------------------------------------

    worlds number one free ICMP monitoring platform: https://pinescore.com

  • The logs should be there at the firewall and be available through log viewer. In fact it is a bit opposite to what you said Lucar Toni: the ATP reports (something that I would expect as a Central Cloud Feature) are available on the XG but not the logs.

    : please go to Reports > Network & Threats

    and select ATP and the correct time frame.

    I can still find the event from 2021 04 22 on our XG there. In our case it was the DNS server resolving a request to this FQDN which was blocked by XG ATP.

  • Should the Logviewer show the same information? 

    __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  • Of course it should show something  after such a short time!

  • Yes, I was able to find the event within the Report section. I wish I could determine what triggers their computer to try and hit that url. I supposed they could have clicked a link they shouldn't have. Fortunately, the XG blocks it. I'm fairly new to Sophos and far from being an expert in security but I would like to learn more. Thank you all for sharing some of your brains with me. I can see the Sophos tools have a lot more to offer than I am currently taking advantage of.