v2.7

It has been over a year since the release of OSSEC 2.6 in July 2011. Through all this time many developers have contributed patches and many users have tested several pre-release builds. A sincere THANKS to all of you.

The key enhancements in v2.7 are:

• Installation
  • Add hybrid mode – allows the same host to be both a server and an agent, useful for multi-tier OSSEC deployment.
  • Add manage_agents -f option for bulk generation of client keys from an input file.
  • During Agent installation, allow the OSSEC server to be specified using hostname instead of IP.
• Syscheck
  • Add prelinking support – reduce confusion when a file change is the result of prelinking.
• Rootcheck
  • Add fine-grained configuration control – allows you to turn ON/OFF individual rootcheck tasks for more efficiency and flexibility. The default is all ON.
• Log monitoring/analysis
  • Add GeoIP lookup support – allows geographical city names to be associated with IP addresses in OSSEC alerts, for more intelligent correlation.
• Alert options and syslog output
  • Add syscheck MD5/SHA1 sum to alerts for easier integration with third-party file signature checking.
  • Support JSON and Splunk formats in syslog output.
• Rules and other notable changes/fixes
  • Windows 2000 logs support has been deprecated (but will probably still work fine). Vista and Windows Server 2008 logs are now officially supported.
  • Windows registry syscheck alert level has been reduced from 7 to 5 to reduce unnecessary noise from alerts which do not indicate a compromise.
  • Update decoders include: PIX, auditd, apache, pam, php.
  • Many updated rules, such as new checks for vulnerable web apps exploitation attempts.
  • Update rootcheck rules.
  • ossec-client.sh now allows for ‘reload’, in addition to ‘restart’
  • Many bug fixes…
• LICENSE text updated by adding exception clause for OpenSSL, while OSSEC is still under GPLv2