Our product
Wazuh’s main components are the agents that run on each monitored host and the server that analyzes data received from the agents and agentless sources like syslog. In addition, the server forwards event data to an Elasticsearch cluster where information is indexed and stored.
Wazuh agent
The Wazuh agent is used to monitor a host. It collects different types of system and application data and forwards it to the Wazuh manager. Different agent tasks or processes are used to monitor the system in different ways (e.g., monitoring file integrity, reading system log messages and scanning system configurations).
This diagram represents the internal tasks and processes that take place at the agent level:
Wazuh server
The server is in charge of analyzing the data received from the agents and triggering alerts when an event matches a rule (e.g. intrusion detected, file changed, configuration not compliant with policy, possible rootkit, etc…).
The server usually runs on a stand-alone physical machine, virtual machine or cloud instance and runs agent components with the purpose of monitoring itself.
Elastic Stack
The integration of Wazuh with Elastic Stack provides a feed of already decoded log messages to be indexed by Elasticsearch and a real-time web console for alert and log data analysis. In addition, the Wazuh user interface (running on top of Kibana) can be used for management and monitoring of your Wazuh infrastructure.
Security Analytics
Wazuh is used to collect, aggregate, index and analyze security data, helping organizations detect intrusions, threats and behavioral anomalies.
As cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated, real-time monitoring and security analysis are needed for fast threat detection and remediation. That is why our light-weight agent provides the necessary monitoring and response capabilities, while our server component provides the security intelligence and performs data analysis.
Intrusion Detection
Wazuh agents scan the monitored systems looking for malware, rootkits and suspicious anomalies. They can detect hidden files, cloaked processes or unregistered network listeners, as well as inconsistencies in system call responses.
In addition to agent capabilities, the server component uses a signature-based approach to intrusion detection, using its regular expression engine to analyze collected log data and look for indicators of compromise.
Log Data Analysis
Wazuh agents read operating system and application logs, and securely forward them to a central manager for rule-based analysis and storage.
The Wazuh rules help make you aware of application or system errors, misconfigurations, attempted and/or successful malicious activities, policy violations and a variety of other security and operational issues.
File Integrity Monitoring
Wazuh monitors the file system, identifying changes in content, permissions, ownership, and attributes of files that you need to keep an eye on. In addition, it natively identifies users and applications used to create or modify files.
File integrity monitoring capabilities can be used in combination with threat intelligence to identify threats or compromised hosts. In addition, several regulatory compliance standards, such as PCI DSS, require it.
Vulnerability Detection
Wazuh agents pull software inventory data and send this information to the server, where it is correlated with continuously updated CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure) databases, in order to identify well-known vulnerable software.
Automated vulnerability assessment helps you find the weak spots in your critical assets and take corrective action before attackers exploit them to sabotage your business or steal confidential data.
Configuration Assessment
Wazuh monitors system and application configuration settings to ensure they are compliant with your security policies, standards and/or hardening guides. Agents perform periodic scans to detect applications that are known to be vulnerable, unpatched, or insecurely configured.
Additionally, configuration checks can be customized, tailoring them to properly align with your organization. Alerts include recommendations for better configuration, references and mapping with regulatory compliance.
Incident Response
Wazuh provides out-of-the-box active responses to perform various countermeasures to address active threats, such as blocking access to a system from the threat source when certain criteria are met.
In addition, Wazuh can be used to remotely run commands or system queries, identifying indicators of compromise (IOCs) and helping perform other live forensics or incident response tasks.
Regulatory Compliance
Wazuh provides some of the necessary security controls to become compliant with industry standards and regulations. These features, combined with its scalability and multi-platform support help organizations meet technical compliance requirements.
Wazuh is widely used by payment processing companies and financial institutions to meet PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) requirements. Its web user interface provides reports and dashboards that can help with this and other regulations (e.g. GPG13 or GDPR).
Cloud Security Monitoring
Wazuh helps monitoring cloud infrastructure at an API level, using integration modules that are able to pull security data from well known cloud providers, such as Amazon AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. In addition, Wazuh provides rules to assess the configuration of your cloud environment, easily spotting weaknesses.
In addition, Wazuh light-weight and multi-platform agents are commonly used to monitor cloud environments at the instance level.
Do you need help?
Our security engineers and support team are at your disposal for any problem that may come up. Our goal is to make your life easier.
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Learn more in our documentation.