AlienVault OTX Pulse collector

Overview

AlienVault OTX provides open access to a global community of threat researchers and security professionals. It delivers community-generated threat data, enables collaborative research, and automates the process of updating your security infrastructure with threat data from any source. OTX enables anyone in the security community to actively discuss, research, and share the latest threat data, trends, and techniques, strengthening your defenses while helping others do the same.

This document provides information about the AlienVault-OTX Pulse Collector, which facilitates automated interactions, with an AlienVault-OTX server to perform operations, such as retrieving details for an indicator, and for a pulse.

AlienVault OTX Pulse

Pulses are the format for the OTX community to share information about threats. Pulses provide you with a summary of the threat, a view into the software targeted, and the related indicators of compromise (IOC) that can be used to detect the threats. A pulse consists of at least one, but more often multiple Indicators of Compromise (IoCs). An IoC is an artifact observed on a network or in an endpoint judged with a high degree of confidence to be a threat vector. Examples of threat vectors include campaigns or infrastructures used by an attacker.

The table in this article provides a list of IoC types.

Data source description

The data retrieved from AlientVault OTX is adapted to be stored in Devo. Each received pulse contains several hundred or thousands of indicators. Each indicator is stored individually in the Devo table threatintel.alienvault_otx.indicators, but combined with its pulse information.

An example of the information item stored in Devo, containing both indicator and pulse data combined, can be seen in Example 1:

{"eventdate":"2022-03-31T10:40:09.509+0200","hostname":"2020-hostname",
"id":"32321","indicator":"malware.indicator.web","type":"domain","created":"2022-03-31T10:02:54.000+0200","content":"","title":"","description":"",
"expiration":"","is_active":"1","role":"malware_hosting",
"pulse_id":"1ff3a9a","pulse_name":"New Wave Of Phishing Campaign","pulse_description":"","pulse_author_name":"AlienVault",
"pulse_modified":"2022-03-31T10:02:52.294+0200","pulse_created":"2022-03-31T10:02:52.294+0200",
"pulse_revision":"1","pulse_tlp":"white","pulse_public":"1","pulse_adversary":"",
"pulse_tags":"["phishing", "trojan"]","pulse_targeted_countries":"[]","pulse_malware_families":"["Family 1"]","pulse_attack_ids":"["T1XX1","TA0XX2"]",
"pulse_references":"[\"https://reference.web\"]","pulse_industries":"[\"Finance\"]","pulse_extract_source":"[]"}

Example 2

{"eventdate":"2022-03-31T10:39:23.475+0200","hostname":"2020-hostname",
"id":"550876","indicator":"2.3.4.5","type":"IPv4","created":"2022-03-12T12:18:02.000+0100","content":"","title":"Blaster UDP, Trojan from scan.example.org port 48909","description":"",
"expiration":"2022-04-11T13:00:00.000+0200","is_active":"1","role":"trojan",
"pulse_id":"606d75c1189a9430","pulse_name":"Example Honeypot","pulse_description":"Honeypot","pulse_author_name":"john",
"pulse_modified":"2022-03-31T10:39:02.654+0200","pulse_created":"2021-04-07T11:05:05.353+0200",
"pulse_revision":"1","pulse_tlp":"white","pulse_public":"1","pulse_adversary":"",
"pulse_tags":"["honeypot", "rdp", "ssh"]","pulse_targeted_countries":"["Italy"]","pulse_malware_families":"[]","pulse_attack_ids":"[]",
"pulse_references":"[]","pulse_industries":"[]","pulse_extract_source":"[]"}

Vendor setup

In order to enable AlienVault OTX Pulse Devo Collector, you will need to follow the following steps:

1. Go to AlienVault Open Threat Exchange.

2. Click on the Login tab. If you don’t have an account you can sign up, and you will be able to access detailed documentation as well as your API key via the dashboard.

3. Type your login ID and password (provided by AlienVault) and log in. 

4. After the console loads, click API Integration on the menu. 

5. This loads the DirectConnect API page. This section of the panel is also where you’ll be able to confirm from the OTX side that your connection is functional.

6. Copy your OTX API key. This is the value that you need to update the api_key value in your collector configuration file.

Run the collector