Very flexible Host IDS designed for Windows. We are making use of a previously developped rule engine Gene designed to match Windows events according to custom rules. The rules are simple to write and easy to understand so that everyone can understand why a rule has triggered.
With the democratisation of Sysmon, this tools is perfect to quickly build hunting rules or simply monitoring rules to screen things of interest happening on your machine(s). With WHIDS you don't have to bother with an over complicated Sysmon configuration which often turns to the nightmare when you want to be very specific.The simplest thing is just to enable all the logging capabilites of Sysmon and let WHIDS do his job, grab a coffee and wait for the juicy stuff to happen. The tool has a very low overhead for the system, according to our current benchmarks.
This tool can be used on any Windows machine so you might install it easer on regular workstations or on Windows Event Collectors where you are receiving all the logs of your infrastructure. The output format is nothing else than JSON so it is very easy to handle the alerts generated by the HIDS in whatever tool you want to use for this purpose like ELK, Splunk or simply your favourite SIEM.
Here is an example of a rule designed to catch suspicious access to lsass.exe as it is done by the well known Mimikatz credential dump tool. You can find a bunch of other rules on our repository.
{
"Name": "MaliciousLsassAccess",
"Tags": ["Mimikatz", "Credentials", "Lsass"],
"Meta": {
"EventIDs": [10],
"Channels": ["Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational"],
"Computers": [],
"Traces": [],
"Criticality": 10,
"Author": "0xrawsec"
},
"Matches": [
"$ct: CallTrace ~= 'UNKNOWN'",
"$lsass: TargetImage ~= '(?i:\\\\lsass\\.exe$)'"
],
"Condition": "$lsass and $ct"
}