Elastic Stack Integration with Command & Control Servers: A Comprehensive Guide

Elastic stack integration with Command & Control server C2

Introduction:

In this project, I successfully implemented a monitoring and detection setup using the Elastic Stack (ELK). This solution detects Command and Control (C2) attacks by leveraging ELK’s advanced capabilities, ensuring comprehensive visibility into malicious activities and proactive threat response.

Installations and Configurations:

This setup requires two different installations of different stacks. In this lab, the installations are performed on the Ubuntu base system.

1. Mythic-Server: In order to install the mythic server, first update the repositories. In my case, I am using Ubuntu Linux. First, clone the repository from GitHub and follow these installation steps:

In the previously mentioned screenshot, the command mythic-cli start is used to build the server but before that, edit the .env file located in the mythic directory. This file contains the bound addresses whether the user wants to keep them to just the local host or not. This value can either be set to true or false, depending upon the end user’s choice. As shown in this screenshot :

The mythic server has been installed successfully and can be accessed from the local browser:

Note: use your .env file to extract the admin username and password.

2. ELK Stack:

Download the elastic search latest file from the official repository or from their webpage . In my case I am using the base operating system linux ubuntu. For ELK setup , two different modules needed to be downloaded: the elastic search and kibana . Then they both will be interlinked to share and visualize the data . Use the wget command to download the package and then use dpkg-i command to install the elastic search into the target system.