Automated analysis of logs?

From: Mark G. Spencer <mspencer(at)evidentdata.com>
Date: Tue Apr 08 2003 - 13:27:46 EDT

I read through much of the prior thread on analysis of logs and apparently the applications mentioned will provide statistics, but they don't actually make any determinations about activity.

Are there any open-source applications that I can drop various kinds of logs into (especially IIS logs) and get not only statistics, but information and/or "warnings" about various kind of known activity? Things like Nimda scanning, backdoor attempts, etc. I'm not looking for 100% precision when identifying activity, but if I can identify or in some cases filter out all known activity and concentrate on unknown, that would be really helpful.

The last time I went through an IIS log I put together a homegrown Access database and began classifying activity. You can imagine the amount of time this took .. ;)

I know some people are more proactive about this and stick a Snort box upstream, but in most cases I am responding to an event where the deed has been done and I can't go back in time, so I only have logs available to me.

If there are no OS solutions, is there a well regarded commercial product that can do this?

Mark

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Received on Tue Apr 8 19:33:37 2003