Ship ModSecurity logs

ModSecurity, sometimes called Modsec, is an open-source web application firewall. This integration allows you to send ModSecurity logs to your Logz.io SIEM account.

Configure Filebeat

Before you begin, you’ll need:

• Apache2 Web Server and Terminal access to the instance running it
• ModSecurity module installed
• OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set (CRS) imported
• Filebeat

##### Download the Logz.io public certificate to your credentials server

For HTTPS shipping, download the Logz.io public certificate to your certificate authority folder.

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/logzio/public-certificates/master/AAACertificateServices.crt --create-dirs -o /etc/pki/tls/certs/COMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA.crt

Configure Filebeat

Open the Filebeat configuration file (/etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml) with your preferred text editor. Copy and paste the code block below, overwriting the previous content. (You want to replace the file’s content with this code block.)

Filebeat requires a file extension specified for the log input.

### Filebeat ###
filebeat.inputs:

- type: filestream
  paths:
    - /var/log/apache2/error.log
  fields:
    logzio_codec: json
    token: <<LOG-SHIPPING-TOKEN>>
    type: modsecurity
  fields_under_root: true
  encoding: utf-8
  ignore_older: 3h

### Output ###
output:
  logstash:
    hosts: ["<<LISTENER-HOST>>:5015"]
    ssl:
      certificate_authorities: ['/etc/pki/tls/certs/COMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA.crt']

If you’re running Filebeat 7 to 8.1, paste the code block below instead:

### Filebeat ###
filebeat.inputs:

- type: log
  paths:
    - /var/log/apache2/error.log
  fields:
    logzio_codec: json
    token: <<LOG-SHIPPING-TOKEN>>
    type: modsecurity
  fields_under_root: true
  encoding: utf-8
  ignore_older: 3h

#For version 6.x and lower
#filebeat.registry_file: /var/lib/filebeat/registry

# For version 7 and higher
filebeat.registry.path: /var/lib/filebeat

# The following processors are to ensure compatibility with version 7
processors:
- rename:
    fields:
     - from: "agent"
       to: "beat_agent"
    ignore_missing: true
- rename:
    fields:
     - from: "log.file.path"
       to: "source"
    ignore_missing: true

### Output ###
output:
  logstash:
    hosts: ["<<LISTENER-HOST>>:5015"]
    ssl:
      certificate_authorities: ['/etc/pki/tls/certs/COMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA.crt']

Replace the placeholders to match your specifics. (They are indicated by the double angle brackets << >>):

• Replace <<LOG-SHIPPING-TOKEN>> with the token of the account you want to ship to.

• Replace <<LISTENER-HOST>> with the host for your region. For example, listener.logz.io if your account is hosted on AWS US East, or listener-nl.logz.io if hosted on Azure West Europe. The required port depends whether HTTP or HTTPS is used: HTTP = 8070, HTTPS = 8071.

One last validation - make sure Logz.io is the only output and appears only once. If the file has other outputs, remove them.

Start Filebeat

Start or restart Filebeat for the changes to take effect.

Check Logz.io for your logs

Give your logs some time to get from your system to ours, and then open Open Search Dashboards.

If you still don’t see your logs, see Filebeat troubleshooting.