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CB Event Forwarder 3.0.0 Released

Posted on December 10, 2015

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Major new features in 3.0

• Vastly improved performance & reliability
• New monitoring infrastructure; the service has a JSON-based API to retrieve diagnostics on its processing. See the README for more details.

In general, the new cb-event-forwarder 3.0 is designed to be a drop-in replacement for previous versions of the event forwarder. There are a few bug fixes, configuration changes and enhancements of note. The most important change is that the service is now managed by the “upstart” system in CentOS 6. The service command is no longer used to control the service; instead use start cb-event-forwarder and stop cb-event-forwarder to manually start and stop the service.

Upgrades should be transparent via yum upgrade cb-event-forwarder. For best results, stop the old cb-event-forwarder service before upgrading. Note that the old cb-event-forwarder had bugs that resulted in zombie processes left even after the service is stopped; it is recommended to killall cb-event-forwarder before upgrading as well to kill those zombie processes.

Configuration changes

The configuration file location still defaults to /etc/cb/integrations/event-forwarder/cb-event-forwarder.conf and most existing configuration files will work unchanged with this new version. The following changes have been made to the configuration file in version 3.0:

• The S3 output now expects the AWS credentials to be placed in the AWS standard locations for the API. The aws_key and aws_secret options are now ignored.

  • You can use aws configure to configure them interactively
  • The environment variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, etc.
  • The file ~/.aws/credentials on Linux and Mac OS X
  • Amazon EC2 instances may use the EC2 metadata service
  • See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-started.html for more information.

• The S3 output now supports changing the region and temporary directory from the s3out configuration option.

  • s3out=(temp-file-directory):(region):(bucket-name)

• There is a new option, http_server_port which defaults to 33706.

  • This port is opened on the system running the cb-event-forwarder to report back status information. See the README for more information on the status report.

• The message_processor_count configuration option is now ignored.

  • The number of message processors is automatically set to twice the number of CPU cores available when the cb-event-forwarder starts.

• There is a new option, output_format for switching between LEEF and JSON output formats

  • The LEEF output format is optimized for IBM QRadar

• The stdout output option has been removed.

Output format

• The tcp output now places a newline (\r\n) between each event in the output stream

• Bugfix: the output from the childproc event type now contains the correct process_guid value

• Bugfix: the output from the procend event type now contains the MD5 from the process that exited in the md5 value

Operations

• The daemon is now managed by the “upstart” system in CentOS 6.

  • Use the start and stop commands to control the daemon: start cb-event-forwarder.

• The daemon now supports the SIGHUP signal.

  • When configured with a file output, SIGHUP will immediately roll over the event file
  • When configured with an s3 output, SIGHUP will immediately roll over the current log and flush the logs to S3

• The cb-event-forwarder now starts an HTTP server on port 33706 with configuration and status reporting. A raw JSON output is available on http://:33706/debug/vars. Note that this port may have to be opened via iptables for it to be accessed remotely.