The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a new tool to help with the detection of potential compromise within Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 environments.
Dubbed Aviary, the new tool is a dashboard that makes it easy to visualize and analyze output from Sparrow, the compromise detection tool that was released in December 2020.
Built by CISA to help with the detection of malicious activity related to SolarWinds compromise, Sparrow can be used by network defenders to hunt for potential malicious activity within Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD), Microsoft 365 (M365), and Office 365 (O365) environments.
Sparrow was designed to help identify both accounts and applications that might have been compromised within an organization’s Azure/M365 environment.
With Sparrow, defenders can look out for domain authentication or federation modifications, find new and modified credentials in logs, detect privilege escalation, detect OAuth consent and users’ consent to applications, identify anomalous SAML token sign-ins, and check the Graph API application permissions for service principals and apps in the environment, among others.
A Splunk-based dashboard, the newly released Aviary is meant to facilitate the analysis of output data from Sparrow.
The tool is now available on GitHub, with additional information on how to install Aviary, after running Sparrow, included in CISA’s January announcement for the detection tool, which has been updated this week with instructions on using Aviary.
Related: Reinventing Managed Security Services’ Detection and Response
Related: The Crucial Component of Detection and Response: Intelligence Pivoting
