Howdy. Is there a good program, or set of programs intended for scanning the logs on my computer to detect possible malicious activity? I'm curious now, b/c I just went through my httpd logs and found a huge number of:

123.456.789.123 - - [22/Sep/2001:07:12:14 -0400] "GET /scripts/..%25%35%63../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0" 404 310 "-" "-"


I know I'm not vulnerable to this, but I do want to block the ips of anyone with bad intent.

Now I realize there's lots of logs on the machine that I rarely look at. It would be nice to have something to go through them for me.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
justin

A decent log scanner is LogSentry, by Psionic. It scans my logs every couple of hours and tells me the hostnames/IP addresses of anyone who scanned me, how many attempts there were, etc... it also sends me information about failed login attempts, various processes starting and stopping, stuff like that. I don't know if that is the sort of depth you are looking for... this is on my home system, so it is fine with me. It is just a collection of shell scripts they wrote so you don't have to. Also, their firewall program, PortSentry, works great. It can be used by itself, but works better when you use it as an interface to ipchains or iptables. It makes my life simpler.

ahh, yes i use port sentry on my server. I'll have to check that out. Thanks a lot.

J

Chalk up one more vote for PortSentry+iptables and LogCheck.

What about all the stuff at snort.org? Any experience with that vs. portsentry? They have a lot of programs for scanning and evaluating the logs. Also looks like there's good support on their site, and frequent updates.

Justin

Portsentry only looks for connects on a port, where Snort actually scans for a signature.
This means that if Portsentry is used for adding blocking rules, you could D0S the box by spoofing souce addresses. Snort will actually scan if a signature matches any known malicious traffic. Even then it won't take action itself (it can't), you would need any of the contributed apps like Guardian to add blocking rules.

Earlier this year I found that reason enough to trade in Portsentry for Snort. Another reason is mr Roland doesn't seem to expand/develop Portsentry anymore.