A company, regardless of its size and market power, may go out of business or lose a lot of value because of a security incident on its information system.

The number of vulnerabilities and the interest of cyber-attackers is only increasing. With the advent of the monetization of botnet cyber attacks or the installation of crypto-miners for example, the threats are going more varied and intensified, but less targeted. The vast majority of companies are digital and increasingly exposed on the Internet. The level of cyber exposure is also higher. The “Cyber” risk has become vital. Today, everything has changed and tomorrow everything will change even faster. Where manual analysis was sufficient, paradigms of risk assessment are moving towards more automation. But we need intelligent automation.

The technological offer is not lacking, but after more than 10 years of experience, our observation is indisputable:

1. The best tools are only satisfactory in part of their capacities
2. It remains difficult to have a realistic and continuous visibility on the risks borne by the assets exposed by an organization.
3. Business processes tend to adapt to the tool capabilities rather than using these tools to support their cyber surveillance strategy.

This automation strategy also tends to address the drastic lack of competent cyber security resources and retention of talents. The automation of recurrent, time-consuming and low-value-added tasks will allow teams to focus on more complex and therefore more motivating topics.

PatrOwl is an open-source solution for automating calls to commercial or open source tools that perform checks. To date, around 40 tools or online services are supported. Beyond centralizing the results (vulnerabilities, meta-data, asset states, …) obtained, the PatrOwl analysis engine compares these results with its knowledge base and other third-party services to determine scenarios of attacks (predictive analysis) or to trigger actions. (alerting, program calls, …). Largely customizable, PatrOwl is suitable for supporting penetration testing, vulnerability audit and compliance, static source audit, threat research (CTI) and security incident response (SOC) activities / DFIR).

— Link to the slides of Paris Open-Source Summit 2018 talk: http://www.patrowl.io/docs/PatrOwl_-_OSSPARIS18_-_20181206.pdf

Speaker

Nicolas MATTIOCCO (GreenLock Advisory)

Bio

Nicolas MATTIOCCO is a french information security expert working as a consultant for 10 years. He is currently an independent contractor in a CERT/CSIRT of a major financial institution and actively working on Red Team and SOAR activities. Nicolas also developed PatrOwl, an open-source and scalable platform for automating and orchestrating Security Operations like Penetration testing, Vulnerability Assessment, Code review, Compliance, Cyber-Threat Intelligence / Hunting and SOC, and DFIR operations (see https://patrowl.io).