zerotect

Table of Contents

• What is Zerotect
• Install Zerotect
• Usage
  • Recommended usage
    • Understanding the minimal configuration
  • All CLI options
• Partners/Integrations
  • Micro Focus ArcSight
  • PagerDuty
• Zerotect Log
• Contributing
• Zero Day Reward Program

What is Zerotect

Detecting malicious scans can be the first indicator of a potential attack. Watching for things like port scans is commonplace in security circles, but how do you detect a BROP attack, or any other kind of buffer-overflow attack for that matter?

Zerotect is a small open source agent that monitors kernel logs to look for conclusive proof of memory-based exploits from the side-effects of those attacks. These appear in the form of process crashes (faults). Zerotect doesn't actively intercept network traffic, but instead, passively monitors kernel logs for anomalies. This means the attack surface of your servers isn't increased, and the stability of Zerotect doesn't affect the stability of anything else on the system.

When anomalies are detected, Zerotect can report these anomalies to a variety of analytics tools. Our intent is to support a variety of tools, and integrations with those tools. Please file a Feature Request with examples of how you'd like to configure it and use it.

Install Zerotect

See Installation for details on how to install/run Zerotect as a proper monitor in a production environment.

To install quickly:

curl -s -L https://github.com/polyverse/zerotect/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh

Partners/Integrations

Zerotect by itself provides limited actionable value. The best value is derived when Zerotect is one of many signals that a larger monitoring/observability strategy is processing. This could be a SOC, a SIEM, an alerting system or just a simple log aggregator.

To that end Zerotect supports a number of outbound integrations (i.e. where it sends its data) listed below.

Micro Focus ArcSight

Zerotect on ArcSight Marketplace

Zerotect sends events to ArcSight through the Syslog SmartConnector. It is easy to configure in a single command. For more details read the Administration Guide.

PagerDuty

Zerotect integration with PagerDuty

Zerotect can send detected events to the PagerDuty Events API V2 through a single configuration. View the PagerDuty Integration Guide for details.

Zerotect Log

Zerotect stores activities in the log file located in /var/log/zerotect.log. Examine this log file for further investigation of potential attacks.

The authoritative log format is defined in schema.json.

You may use it to generate parsers. The schema contains documentation comments, explanations of fields, and so forth.

Contributing

We believe that open-source and robust community contributions make everyone safer, therefore we accept pretty much ALL contributions so long as: (a) They don't break an existing use-case or dependency and (b) They don't do something that is wildly out of scope of the project.

Please read our Code of Conduct, and our Contribution Guidelines before starting work on a new feature or bug.