

With osquery and Santa we have a really good picture of the executions that occur on a host. Using osquery we can perform queries to search for IOCs (Indicators of Compromise) on a host such as the recent Proton malware:

osquery by default comes with several packs of useful queries and the core application is regularly being updated to include new features.This is useful if we are looking for suspicious applications or if we want to know if a machine has some specific configuration settings.The ability to parse preference and configuration files, list installed applications, current running processes, file path information, and installed browser plugins.

Some of the useful features of this service are: This tool allows users to query the state of their system via a SQL interface. Osquery is an open source operating system instrumentation framework for Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD by Facebook.

Even if you are able to pinpoint the cause of these issues you may still be unable to configure the tool to prevent the issue from recurring. You might also experience issues like having hosts unexpectedly shut down due to a kernel panic. Even when you do find a tool that fits all your needs, you may run into unexpected performance issues that make the machine nearly unusable by your employees. It can be hard to find mature tools that proactively detect security incidents. Proper host monitoring on macOS can be very difficult for some organizations. How would you detect it? How could you find out what happened on the machine? What did the malware do? Did it steal your browser’s passwords? What network connections did the malware make? Was it looking for crypto currency? By having good telemetry and a good host monitoring solution for your machines you can collect the context necessary to answer these important questions. Let’s say a machine in your corporate fleet gets infected with malware.
