About events

Events are information security events registered on the monitored elements of the organization's IT infrastructure. For example, events include login attempts, interactions with a database, and sensor information broadcasts. Each separate event may seem meaningless, but when considered together they form a bigger picture of network activities to help identify security threats. This is the core functionality of KUMA.

KUMA receives events from logs and restructures their information, making the data from different event sources consistent (this process is called normalization). Afterwards, the events are filtered, aggregated, and later sent to the correlator service for analysis and to the Storage for retaining. When KUMA recognizes specific event or a sequences of events, it creates correlation events, that are also analyzed and retained. If an event or sequence of events indicates a potential security threat, KUMA creates an alert. This alert consists of a warning about the threat and all related data that should be investigated by a security officer.

Throughout their life cycle, events undergo conversions and may receive different names. Below is a description of a typical event life cycle:

The first steps are carried out in a collector.

1. Raw event. The original message received by KUMA from an event source using a connector is called a raw event. This is an unprocessed message and it cannot be used yet by KUMA. To fit into the KUMA pipeline, raw events must be normalized into the KUMA data model. That's what the next stage is for.
2. Normalized event. A normalizer transforms 'raw' event data in accordance with the KUMA data model. After this conversion, the original message becomes a normalized event and can be used by KUMA for analysis. From here on, only normalized events are used in KUMA. Raw events are no longer used, but they can be kept as a part of normalized events inside the Raw field.

   The program has the following normalizers:

   • JSON
   • CEF
   • Regexp
   • Syslog (as per RFC3164 and RFC5424)
   • CSV/TSV
   • Key-value
   • XML
   • Netflow v5, v9, IPFIX (v10), sFlow v5
   • SQL

   At this point normalized events can already be used for analysis.

3. Event destination. After the Collector service have processed an event, it is ready to be used by other KUMA services and sent to the KUMA Correlator and/or Storage.

The next steps of the event life cycle are completed in the correlator.

Event types:

1. Base event. An event that was normalized.
2. Aggregated event. When dealing with a large number of similar events, you can "merge" them into a single event to save processing time and resources. They act as base events, but In addition to all the parameters of the parent events (events that are "merged"), aggregated events have a counter that shows the number of parent events it represents. Aggregated events also store the time when the first and last parent events were received.
3. Correlation event. When a sequence of events is detected that satisfies the conditions of a correlation rule, the program creates a correlation event. These events can be filtered, enriched, and aggregated. They can also be sent for storage or looped into the Correlator pipeline.
4. Audit event. Audit events are created when certain security-related actions happen in KUMA; these events are used to ensure system integrity. They are automatically placed in a separate storage space and stored for at least 365 days.
5. Monitoring event. These events are used to track changes in the amount of data received by KUMA.