Detection Lab

Purpose

This lab has been designed with defenders in mind. Its primary purpose is to allow the user to quickly build a Windows domain that comes pre-loaded with security tooling and some best practices when it comes to system logging configurations. It can easily be modified to fit most needs or expanded to include additional hosts.

Read more about Detection Lab on Medium here: https://medium.com/@clong/introducing-detection-lab-61db34bed6ae

NOTE: This lab has not been hardened in any way and runs with default vagrant credentials. Please do not connect or bridge it to any networks you care about. This lab is deliberately designed to be insecure; the primary purpose of it is to provide visibility and introspection into each host.

Primary Lab Features:

  • Splunk forwarders are pre-installed and all indexes are pre-created. Technology add-ons for Windows are also preconfigured.
  • A custom Windows auditing configuration is set via GPO to include command line process auditing and additional OS-level logging
  • Palantir’s Windows Event Forwarding subscriptions and custom channels are implemented
  • Powershell transcript logging is enabled. All logs are saved to \\wef\pslogs
  • osquery comes installed on each host and is pre-configured to connect to a Fleet server via TLS. Fleet is preconfigured with the configuration from Palantir’s osquery Configuration
  • Sysmon is installed and configured using SwiftOnSecurity’s open-sourced configuration
  • All autostart items are logged to Windows Event Logs via AutorunsToWinEventLog
  • SMBv1 Auditing is enabled

Requirements

  • 55GB+ of free disk space
  • 16GB+ of RAM
  • Packer 1.0.0 or newer
  • Vagrant 1.9.2 or newer
  • Virtualbox or VMWare Fusion/Workstation

This lab has been successfully tested on:

OS Vagrant Packer Provider
OSX 10.12.4 1.9.3 1.0.0 Virtualbox (5.1.14)
OSX 10.12.6 2.0.1 1.1.2 Virtualbox (5.1.30)
OSX 10.12.4 1.9.2 1.0.0 VMWare Fusion (8.5.6)
OSX 10.12.5 1.9.3 1.0.0 VMWare Fusion (8.5.8)
OSX 10.12.6 2.0.1 1.1.3 VMWare Fusion (8.5.9)

Known Bad Versions:

  • Packer 1.1.2 will fail to build VMWare-ISOs correctly due to this issue.

Quickstart

  1. Determine which Vagrant provider you want to use.
  2. cd to the Packer directory and build the Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 boxes using the commands below. Each build will take about 1 hour. As far as I know, you can only build one box at a time.
$ cd detectionlab/Packer
$ packer build --only=[vmware|virtualbox]-iso windows_10.json
$ packer build --only=[vmware|virtualbox]-iso windows_2016.json
  1. Once both boxes have built successfully, move the resulting boxes (.box files) in the Packer folder to the Boxes folder:

    mv *.box ../Boxes

  2. cd into the Vagrant directory: cd ../Vagrant
  3. Install the Vagrant-Reload plugin: vagrant plugin install vagrant-reload

  4. Ensure you are in the Vagrant folrder and run vagrant up. This command will do the following:
    • Provision the logger host. This host will run the Fleet osquery manager and a fully featured pre-configured Splunk instance.
    • Provision the DC host and configure it as a Domain Controller
    • Provision the WEF host and configure it as a Windows Event Collector in the Servers OU
    • Provision the Win10 host and configure it as a computer in the Workstations OU
  5. Navigate to https://192.168.38.5:8000 in a browser to access the Splunk instance on logger. Default credentials are admin:changeme (you will have the option to change them on the next screen)
  6. Navigate to https://192.168.38.5:8412 in a browser to access the Fleet server on logger. Default credentials are admin:admin123#. Query packs are pre-configured with queries from palantir/osquery-configuration.

Basic Vagrant Usage

Vagrant commands must be run from the “Vagrant” folder.

  • Bring up all Detection Lab hosts: vagrant up (optional --provider=[virtualbox|vmware_fusion|vmware_workstation])
  • Bring up a specific host: vagrant up <hostname>
  • Restart a specific host: vagrant reload <hostname>
  • Restart a specific host and re-run the provision process: vagrant reload <hostname> --provision
  • Destroy a specific host vagrant destroy <hostname>
  • Destroy the entire Detection Lab environment: vagrant destroy (Adding -f forces it without a prompt)
  • SSH into a host (only works with Logger): vagrant ssh logger
  • Check the status of each host: vagrant status
  • Suspend the lab environment: vagrant suspend
  • Resume the lab environment: vagrant resume

Lab Information

  • Domain Name: windomain.local
  • Admininstrator login: vagrant:vagrant
  • Fleet login: admin:admin123#
  • Splunk login: admin:changeme

Lab Hosts

  • DC - Windows 2016 Domain Controller
    • WEF Server Configuration GPO
    • Powershell logging GPO
    • Enhanced Windows Auditing policy GPO
    • Sysmon
    • osquery
    • Splunk Universal Forwarder (Forwards Sysmon & osquery)
    • Sysinternals Tools
  • WEF - Windows 2016 Server
    • Windows Event Collector
    • Windows Event Subscription Creation
    • Powershell transcription logging share
    • Sysmon
    • osquery
    • Splunk Universal Forwarder (Forwards WinEventLog & Powershell & Sysmon & osquery)
    • Sysinternals tools
  • Win10 - Windows 10 Workstation
    • Simulates employee workstation
    • Sysmon
    • osquery
    • Splunk Universal Forwarder (Forwards Sysmon & osquery)
    • Sysinternals Tools
  • Logger - Ubuntu 16.04
    • Splunk Enterprise
    • Fleet osquery Manager

Splunk Indexes

Index Name | Description ———–|———— osquery | osquery/Fleet result logs osquery-status | osquery/fleet INFO/WARN/ERROR logs powershell | Powershell transcription logs sysmon | Logs from the Sysmon service wineventlog | Windows Event Logs

Installed Tools on Windows

  • Sysmon
  • osquery
  • AutorunsToWinEventLog
  • Process Monitor
  • Process Explorer
  • PsExec
  • TCPView
  • Google Chrome
  • Atom editor
  • WinRar
  • Mimikatz

Applied GPOs

Known Issues and Workarounds

Vagrant has been particularly flaky with VMWare and I encountered many issues while testing. However, most of the issues are easily resolved.


Issue: Vagrant reports: Message: HTTPClient::KeepAliveDisconnected: while provisioning.
Workaround: Run $ vagrant reload <hostname> --provision


Issue: Vagrant timed out while attempting to connect via WinRM after Win10 host joins the domain.
Workaround Documented in #21. Just run $ vagrant reload win10 --provision


Issue: Vagrant is unable to forward a port for you
Workaround: Documented in #11. There are a few possibilities:

  1. Try a vagrant reload <hostname> --provision. For whatever reason vagrant up doesn’t fix conflicts but reload does.
  2. Check if something is legitimately occupying the port via sudo lsof -n -iTCP:<port_number>
  3. Follow the instructions from this comment: https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/8130#issuecomment-272963103

Issue: Fleet server becomes unreachable after VM is suspended and resumed

Workaround: Documented in #22. The following commands should make it reachable without deleting data:

$ docker stop $(docker ps -aq)
$ service docker restart
$ cd /home/vagrant/kolide-quickstart
$ docker-compose up -d

Contributing

Please do all of your development in a feature branch on your own fork of detectionlab. Requests for tools and features will be reviewed on a case by case basis, but I will always accept fixes and improvements.

Credits/Resources

A sizable percentage of this code was borrowed and adapted from Stefan Scherer’s packer-windows and adfs2 Github repos. A huge thanks to him for building the foundation that allowed me to design this lab environment.

Acknowledgements