Security Onion 2.4.180 is out, Linux distribution designed for threat hunting, enterprise security monitoring

Doug Burks has announced the release of Security Onion 2.4.180, an updated build of the project's Linux distribution designed for threat hunting, enterprise security monitoring and log management.

Security Onion is a specialist, security-oriented Linux distribution based on Oracle Linux. It is a free and open platform for threat hunting, enterprise security monitoring and log management. It includes custom interfaces for alerting, dashboards, hunting, PCAP, detections and case management. It also includes other tools, such as osquery (a tool for exploring and monitoring operating system data with SQL queries), CyberChef (a web application for encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis), Elasticsearch (a data search engine), Logstash (a data collection and processing engine), Kibana (a data visualization plugin for Elasticsearch), Suricata (an intrusion detection and prevention system) and Zeek (a software network analysis framework).

Updated Components

This release updates several components including:

• Elastic 8.18.6
• Suricata 7.0.12
• Zeek 7.0.10

The Elastic and Suricata updates resolve security issues so we highly recommend upgrading.

Security Onion Pro Feature: Manager Hypervisor

In the recent 2.4.170 release, we added a new hypervisor feature for Security Onion Pro customers. This release improves on that by allowing you to run the hypervisor on a manager. For more information about the Hypervisor feature, please see:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/hypervisor.html

Security Onion Pro Feature: Reporting

Many customers have requested reporting and we are excited to include it in this release! This includes producing reports and data exports for analytical purposes. This allows you to present relevant data to your broader team:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/reports.html

Release Notes

There are many more features and fixes included in this release! For a complete list of all changes, please see the Release Notes:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/release-notes.html#changes

Known Issues

For a list of known issues, please see:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/release-notes.html#known-issues

About Security Onion

Security Onion is a free and open platform built by defenders for defenders. It includes network visibility, host visibility, intrusion detection honeypots, log management, and case management. 

For network visibility, we offer signature based detection via Suricata, rich protocol metadata and file extraction using your choice of either Zeek or Suricata, full packet capture, and file analysis. For host visibility, we offer the Elastic Agent which provides data collection, live queries via osquery, and centralized management using Elastic Fleet. Intrusion detection honeypots based on OpenCanary can be added to your deployment for even more enterprise visibility. All of these logs flow into Elasticsearch and we’ve built our own user interfaces for alerts, dashboards, threat hunting, case management, and grid management. 

Security Onion has been downloaded over 2 million times and is being used by security teams around the world to monitor and defend their enterprises. Our easy-to-use Setup wizard allows you to build a distributed grid for your enterprise in minutes!

Documentation

You can find our online documentation here:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/

Documentation is always a work in progress. If you find documentation that needs to be updated, please let us know as described in the Feedback section below.

New Installations

If this is your first time installing Security Onion 2.4, then we highly recommend starting with an IMPORT installation as shown at:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/first-time-users.html

Once you’re comfortable with your IMPORT installation, then you can move on to more advanced installations as shown at:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/architecture.html

Existing 2.4 Installations

If you have an existing Security Onion 2.4 installation, you can update to the latest version using soup:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/soup.html

Before updating your production deployment, we highly recommend testing the upgrade process on a test deployment that closely matches your production deployment if possible. This is especially important for releases that update components like Salt and Elastic.

2.3 EOL

As a reminder, Security Onion 2.3 reached End Of Life (EOL) on April 6, 2024:

https://blog.securityonion.net/2023/10/6-month-eol-notice-for-security-onion-23.html