Incident Rule Details View

The Incident Rule Details view enables you to create and edit incident rules for creating incidents from alerts. This topic describes the information required when creating or editing a new rule.

Note: The information in this topic applies to NetWitness Version 11.1 and later.

What do you want to do?

Role I want to ... Show me how
Administrator Configure alert sources for the Respond view.

Step 1. Configure Alert Sources to Display Alerts in the Respond View

Administrator Assign Respond view permissions.

Step 2. Assign Respond View Permissions

Analyst, Content Expert, SOC Manager Enable, create, or edit an incident rule. Step 3. Enable and Create Incident Rules for Alerts
Analyst, Content Expert, SOC Manager Set up and use the User Behavior default rule.
Set up or verify the preconfigured (default) incident rules.		 Set Up and Verify Default Incident Rules
Incident Responders, Analysts, Content Experts, SOC Manager View the results of my incident rule (View Detected Threats). See "Responding to Incidents" in the NetWitness Respond User Guide.

Go to the NetWitness All Versions Documents page and find NetWitness Platform guides to troubleshoot issues.

Related Topics

Quick Look

To access the Incident Rule Details view, do one of the following:

  • To create a rule, go to netwitness_configureicon_24x21.png (Configure) > Incident Rules and click Create Rule.

  • To edit a rule, go to netwitness_configureicon_24x21.png (Configure) > Incident Rules and click the link in the Name column for the rule that you want to update.

    The Incident Rule Details view is displayed. The following figure shows the Incident Rule Details view in Rule Builder query mode.

    netwitness_12.1_incruleex_1122.png
    In the Match Conditions section, if you select Advanced query mode, a field to enter advanced queries is available as shown in the following figure.

    netwitness_incruledetvwadv.png

The following table describes the options available when creating or editing incident rules.

Section Field Description

Basic

Settings

Basic Settings

 Enabled

Select to enable the rule.

Name*

Name of the rule. *This is a required field.

Description

 A description of the rule to indicate which alerts get aggregated.

Match Conditions*

Query Mode

Rule Builder: Select the Rule Builder option if you want to build a query with various conditions that can be grouped. You can also have nested groups of conditions.

In the Match Conditions, you can set the value to All of these, Any of these, or None of these. Depending on what you select, the criteria types specified in the Conditions and Group of conditions are matched to group the alerts.

For example, if you set the match condition to All of these, alerts that match the criteria mentioned in the Conditions and Group Conditions are grouped into one incident.

  • Add a Condition to be matched by clicking the Add Condition button.
  • Add a Group of Conditions by clicking the Add Group button and add conditions by clicking the Add Condition button.

You can include multiple Conditions and Groups of Conditions that can be matched as per criteria set and group the incoming alerts into incidents.

Advanced: Select the Advanced query option if you want to use the advanced query builder. You can add a specific condition that needs to be matched as per the matching option selected.

For example, you can type the criteria builder format {"$and": [{"alert.severity" : {"$gt":4}}]} to group alerts that have severity greater than 4.

For advanced syntax, refer to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/operator/query/ or http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/method/db.collection.find/

Action*

 Choose the Action Taken if the Rule Matches the Alert

Group into an Incident: If enabled, the alerts that match the criteria set are grouped into an alert.

Suppress the Alert: If enabled, the alerts that match the criteria are suppressed.

Grouping Options

Group By*

The criteria to group the alerts in accordance with the specified alert fields. You can use a maximum of two fields to group the alerts. You cannot group alerts with fields that do not have values.
When alerts are grouped on an alert field, all matching alerts containing the same meta key value for that field are grouped together in the same incident. (See the following Group By Meta Key Mappings table.)

Time Window

The time range for grouping alerts.
For example, if the time window is set to 1 hour, all alerts that match the criteria set in the Group By field and that arrive within an hour of each other are grouped into an incident.

Advanced Grouping Options

Alerts may sometimes come into Respond missing fields that are expected and used for aggregation into incidents (as defined by incident aggregation rules). This can be due to missing parsers, overly generic matching conditions, unexpected data sources, or log sources with unexpected formats. Choose how to handle alerts missing the fields required by the configured incident aggregation rules:

  • Automatically group them into a single incident over the configured time window.
  • Do not group them and manually include these orphaned alerts into an incident when required.

Incident

Options

Incident Options

 Title*

Title of the incident. You can optionally include placeholders in your title. Placeholders enable you to have different titles based on the attributes you grouped. If you do not use placeholders, all incidents created by the rule will have the same title.

For example, if you grouped them according to the source, you can name the resulting Incident as Alerts for ${groupByValue1}, and the incident for all alerts from NetWitness Endpoint would be named Alerts for NetWitness Endpoint.

Summary

 (Optional) Summary of the incident created by this rule.

Categories

 (Optional) Category of the incident created. An incident can be classified using more than one category.

Assignee

 (Optional) Name of the user assigned to the incident.
Priority

Average of Risk Score across all of the Alerts: Takes the average of the risk scores across all the alerts to set the priority of the incident created.

Highest Risk Score available across all of the Alerts: Takes the highest score available across all the alerts to set the priority of the incident created.

Number of Alerts in the time window: Takes the count of the number of alerts in the time window selected to set the priority of the incident created.

Critical, High, Medium, and Low: Specify the incident priority threshold of the matched incidents. The defaults are:

  • Critical: 90
  • High: 50
  • Medium: 20
  • Low: 1

For example, with the Critical priority set to 90, incidents with a risk score of 90 or higher are assigned a Critical priority for this rule.

Group By Meta Key Mappings

When alerts are grouped on an alert field, all matching alerts containing the same meta key value for that field are grouped together in the same incident. For example, if you select the Group By field value Destination Host, it uses the mapped meta key alert.groupby_host_dst. All alerts with the same meta key value for alert.groupby_host_dst are grouped together in the same incident.

The following table shows the mapped meta keys for the Group By field selections.

Group By Field Value Mapped Meta Key
Alert Name alert.name
Alert Rule Id alert.signature_id
Alert Type alert.groupby_type
Date Created alert.timestamp
Destination Country alert.groupby_destination_country
Destination Domain alert.groupby_domain_dst
Destination Host alert.groupby_host_dst
Destination IP Address alert.groupby_destination_ip
Destination Port alert.groupby_destination_port
Destination User Account alert.groupby_user_dst
Detector IP Address alert.groupby_detector_ip
Domain alert.groupby_domain
Domain for Suspected C&C alert.groupby_c2domain
File Analysis alert.groupby_analysis_file
Filename alert.groupby_filename
File MD5 Hash alert.groupby_data_hash
Risk Score alert.risk_score
Service Analysis alert.groupby_analysis_service
Session Analysis alert.groupby_analysis_session
Severity alert.severity
Source alert.source
Source Country alert.groupby_source_country
Source Domain alert.groupby_domain_src
Source Host alert.groupby_host_src
Source IP Address alert.groupby_source_ip
Source User Account alert.groupby_user_src
Source Username alert.groupby_source_username
User Account alert.groupby_username