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Dramatic increases in the number of cyber security attacks and breaches toward businesses and organizations have been experienced in recent years. The negative impacts of these breaches not only cause the stealing and compromising of sensitive information, malfunctioning of network devices, disruption of everyday operations, financial damage to the attacked business or organization itself, but also may navigate to peer businesses/organizations in the same industry. Therefore, prevention and early detection of these attacks play a significant role in the continuity of operations in IT-dependent organizations. At the same time detection of various types of attacks has become extremely difficult as attacks get more sophisticated, distributed and enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Detection and handling of these attacks require sophisticated intrusion detection systems which run on powerful hardware and are administered by highly experienced security staff. Yet, these resources are costly to employ, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). To address these issues, we developed an architecture -within the GLACIER project- that can be realized as an in-house operated Security Information Event Management (SIEM) system for SMEs. It is affordable for SMEs as it is solely based on free and open-source components and thus does not require any licensing fees. Moreover, it is a Self-Contained System (SCS) and does not require too much management effort. It requires short configuration and learning phases after which it can be self-contained as long as the monitored infrastructure is stable (apart from a reaction to the generated alerts which may be outsourced to a service provider in SMEs, if necessary). Another main benefit of this system is to supply data to advanced detection algorithms, such as multidimensional analysis algorithms, in addition to traditional SIEMspecific tasks like data collection, normalization, enrichment, and storage. It supports the application of novel methods to detect security-related anomalies. The most distinct feature of this system that differentiates it from similar solutions in the market is its user feedback capability. Detected anomalies are displayed in a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to the security staff who are allowed to give feedback for anomalies. Subsequently, this feedback is utilized to fine-tune the anomaly detection algorithm. In addition, this GUI also provides access to network actors for quick incident responses. The system in general is suitable for both Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) environments, while the detection algorithm must be specifically trained for each of these environments individually.
This document describes the work done during the Research Semester in Summer 2006 of Prof. Dr. Stefan Wohlfeil. It is about Security Management tasks and how these tasks might be supported by Open Source software tools. I begin with a short discussion of general management tasks and describe some additional, security related management tasks. These security related tasks should then be added to a software tool which already provides the general tasks. Nagios is such a tool. It is extended to also perform some of the security related management tasks, too. I describe the new checking scripts and how Nagios needs to be configured to use these scripts. The work has been done in cooperation with colleagues from the Polytech- nic of Namibia in Windhoek, Namibia. This opportunity was used to also establish a partnership between the Department of Computer Science at FH Hannover and the Department of Information Technology at the Polytechnic. A first Memorandum of Agreement lays the groundwork for future staff or student exchange.