Managing the Alerts

[pbobby]

How do you CS IDS administrators manage your alerts?

Here's a scenario, one of my sensor submaps lists 300 alarms, 200 of which are netstat scans against a bunch of hosts.

How would you manage the alarm list? In order to delete this mass, you can highlight a lot of alarm icons at once.... however, I dont want to delete the Netstat alarms I've not yet researched.

[a-vazquez]

To effectively manage alarms you have to prioritize them. Processing the alarms in that order and then deleting the alarms as you go would at least allow you to keep track of the ones you have looked at. For difficult alarms that you don't have time to deal with, but do not want to delete, you can use the hide feature and then after deleting the rest of the icons, you can unhide and process what's left. It’s still a very manual process, but that’s the point of alerts.

[johncharris]

You can manage, monitor (event correlation) and maintain all IDS, PIX, IOS firewall, VPN Concentrator, NT, UNIX and Checkpoint alerts through the use of Netforensics. Netforensics will solve the cumbersome task of managing security data. If you want further clarification and product capabilities contact me directly at jharris@netcom-sys.com.

[llubbers]

We do not look so much at the GUI, we do SQL queries on a database that contains all the alarms. We are updating the SQL query as we find benign triggers. I find looking through a list of alarms much easier then looking at icons.

[k.jay]

I rarely look at the GUI. I have the NR Director page me on all IDS hits... if I get one that appears to demand immediate attention, I provide it... if I get one that's benign (and most are) I ignore it. I only go to the GUI to clean it out.

[swoodruff]

Does anyone role the alert up into ITO/OV? We use ITO for monitoring all of our network devices and servers, and I would like to be able to send IDS alerts to this tool also. Eventually I want to be able to use one GUI to manage all alerts.

[marcabal]

I am not sure what ITO is.

Cisco Secure IDS already has the integration into the main OpenView maps in the Unix Director package.

If ITO is a SNMP type of tool that handles Snmp traps, then you might be able to use the nrSnmpTrap program to turn IDS alarms into SNMP traps.

Refer to the User's Guide:

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/iaabu/csids/csids1/csidsug/diradv.htm#41836

NOTE: To get nrSnmpTrap to send the traps to systems other than OpenView then the nrSnmpTrap file will have to be edited to change the trapDest variable.

[durnie]

Vantage Point is the new version of ITO. It is basically a tailing log of events in OV. The ability to send your alerts to the ITO consloe would help in assigning alerts to certain staff and streamline reports into one console. Might have to go to HP on this one...