Azure WAF guided investigation Pocket book utilizing Microsoft Sentinel for automated false optimistic tuning | Azure Weblog and Updates

With particular because of Pete Bryan, Principal Safety Analysis Supervisor, Microsoft Safety.

The SQL injection assault stays one of many crucial assaults within the OWASP Top 10, and it entails injecting a SQL question through the enter knowledge area into an internet software with out enter validation. In accordance with Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2022, 67 % of net software exploits embrace SQL injections.

Azure Internet Utility Firewall (Azure WAF) offers centralized safety of your net purposes from exploits and vulnerabilities. It protects towards OWASP Prime 10 assaults, bot assaults, software layer Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults, and different net assaults.

Azure WAF detects SQL injection assaults and blocks them by default. In sure situations, this might be a false optimistic that requires investigation and creation of Azure WAF exclusions. To finish a profitable investigation, full context in regards to the assault is required and a course of that guides you thru the investigation is required.

We’re happy to announce a brand new Azure WAF guided investigation to tune WAF policy Notebook in preview. It guides you thru an investigation expertise to grasp the Azure WAF incidents in Microsoft Sentinel, establish false positives, and robotically apply exclusions to WAF guidelines to deal with the false positives. This Pocket book permits you to perceive the WAF alert and pivot on key entities of the WAF occasion such because the request URI, shopper IP, hostname, and correlate with Menace Intelligence feeds to get a holistic view of the assault floor.

Azure WAF investigations powered by Microsoft Sentinel

Azure WAF is deeply built-in with Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft’s Safety Info and Occasion Administration (SIEM) answer. Utilizing the present Azure WAF knowledge connector, WAF logs are ingested and later analyzed for a wide range of net software assaults and highly effective visualizations pivoting on the total assault sample are offered to you. This Pocket book is constructed utilizing Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center’s MSTICpy packages. With this Pocket book, you possibly can entry wealthy historic contextual data utilizing Microsoft Sentinel’s capabilities like incident era, entity graph, and menace intelligence correlation, at the side of Azure WAF’s SQL injection detections primarily based on OWASP guidelines and Microsoft Menace Intelligence guidelines.

Automated investigation and mitigation of net software assaults

Our new Azure WAF guided investigation to tune WAF policy Notebook offers an automatic guided investigation for triaging Sentinel incidents triggered by Azure WAF SQL injection guidelines.

The answer consists of the next elements:

  • Azure WAF knowledge connector in Microsoft Sentinel.
  • Microsoft Sentinel incidents which can be generated on account of SQL injection assault detected by the Microsoft Sentinel analytic guidelines.
  • Azure WAF Pocket book that helps examine Azure WAF logs and robotically applies WAF exclusions to the WAF coverage.

A high-level diagram explaining the information stream is given beneath:

High-level diagram explaining the data flow is given below: This picture describes Azure WAF protecting backends hosted in Azure, other clouds and on-premises from traffic originating from malicious actors as well as legitimate users. A WAF triggered log is analyzed by the Sentinel Notebook and an automated exclusion is applied for a confirmed false positive.

Allow us to take a look at two use case situations for utilizing this Pocket book:

Understanding the assault panorama when there’s a true optimistic

Utilizing the Pocket book, you possibly can pivot on numerous assault artifacts resembling IP, URL, or area menace intelligence, and perceive the entity graph. This Pocket book retrieves the WAF SQLi rule that generated the detection and appears up associated SQLi rule occasions throughout the pre-selected time. Based mostly on the above particulars, when you resolve that the SQL injection assault is legitimate then you possibly can replace the incident severity and precedence. On this state of affairs, the online software stays protected by Azure WAF.

Understanding the attack landscape when there is a true positive:This picture describes a threat actor trying to access a SQL database connected to a web application protected Azure WAF. WAF detects SQL injection attack and blocks the call. The log is analyzed in Sentinel Notebook to correlate with Threat Intelligence and visualize in the alert entity graph.

Perceive the assault sample and create exclusions if there is a false optimistic

Utilizing the Pocket book, you possibly can pivot on numerous assault artifacts resembling IP, URL, or area menace intelligence, and perceive the entity graph. This Pocket book retrieves the WAF SQLi rule that generated the detection and appears up associated rule occasions. It additionally retrieves uncooked WAF logs to grasp the relations between the request URI, shopper Ips, hostname entities and permits you to dynamically entry the OWASP rule set in GitHub to grasp the rule match sample. Based mostly on the investigations, when you resolve this incident is a false optimistic, the method to robotically create granular exclusions is offered to you and the exclusions are utilized to the Azure WAF coverage utilizing Azure WAF APIs.

Understand the attack pattern and create exclusions when there is a false positive: This picture describes a legitimate user trying to access the web application and the first request is blocked by WAF as a SQL injection attack. This log is analyzed by the Sentinel Notebook and an automated exclusion is applied since it is confirmed as a false positive. Subsequent requests go through successfully.

The next personas would profit from this Pocket book:

Persona: Developer at SomeUnionFlight.com

Understanding SQL injection detection logic

Chris is a developer at SomeUnionFlight.com. His firm hosts a web site for customers to seek for flights and make flight reservations. They’ve hosted their web site behind WAF with Azure Entrance Door (AFD) the place AFD accepts person requests to go looking their web site. SomeUnionFlight.com has an SQL backend the place they retailer flight data. He notices that when customers attempt to entry the web site, their entry is getting blocked as a result of the URL has “Union” key phrase which is triggering the SQL injection rule. This detection is taken into account as a false optimistic as a result of the “Union” key phrase is used to say a web site title and never an SQL injection assault. He would really like an investigation expertise that helps him perceive find out how to analyze this detection utilizing Microsoft Sentinel and decide if it’s a false optimistic. He would additionally prefer to robotically create exclusions for false positives for the URL with out having to disable your entire rule.

Persona: SecOps analyst at Contoso.com

Understanding collateral assault vectors

Ashley is a Safety Operations analyst at Contoso.com. Her firm has bought each Azure WAF and Microsoft Sentinel. She oversees analyzing WAF logs and figuring out assault patterns. She wish to perceive if the shopper IP or the request URI related to the WAF rule that triggered the SQL injection are Indicators of Compromise (IoC). By understanding associated Menace Intelligence Indicators of Compromises, she will stop future assaults on her group.

Get began at this time

SQL injection assaults are getting extra prevalent by the day and Azure WAF protects net purposes from these assaults. To allow a high-quality investigation expertise for Azure WAF prospects, we’ve created this new Azure WAF guided investigation Pocket book that allows you rapidly perceive full assault floor and take actions on the incidents. You may observe our step-by-step instructions to discover ways to use the Pocket book.

This new Azure WAF Pocket book might be present in Microsoft Sentinel beneath the Notebooks within the Menace Administration part.

1)	This picture describes that this new Notebook can be found by hovering over the Notebooks blade on the left side and searching for the keyword “WAF”. The Azure WAF – guided investigation Notebook is presented to you.

2)	This picture displays the Notebook description and allows users to launch the Notebook using the “Create from template”.