In working with OSSEC agentless for some time now I have come across some limitations in the implementation that I felt needed to be addressed. As OSSEC agentless is designed to preform syscheck functions on remote hosts, more general features are hard (if not impossible) to write into a script. This post will demonstrate an alternative for adding additional features to the OSSEC standard build.
In my last OSSEC post “OSSEC: Agentless to save the day” I went over how to setup agentless monitoring using the built in scripts. With this post I am going to get into the details of how to modify the OSSEC supplied scripts to do your bidding.
OSSEC is a Host Intrusion detection system (HIDS) in name, but in reality it is far more. It’s able to look for rootkits, monitor logs (LIDS), and even actively respond to defined events. While all these features are great the unsung hero is agentless monitoring.
