I am an advocate for the practice of adversary emulation to ensure detection efficacy. Candidly, I don’t consider a detection production-ready until it has been validated with appropriate adversary emulation to ensure the required triggers, alerts, and escalations are met. In many cases, basic human interaction can simulate the adversary per specific scenarios, but this doesn’t scale well. Applications and services to aid in this cause are essential. A couple of years ago I discussed APTSimulator as a means by which to test and simulate the HELK, but I haven’t given proper attention to adversary emulation on Linux. To that end, Chain Reactor “is an open source framework for composing executables that can simulate adversary behaviors and techniques on Linux endpoints. Executables can perform sequences of actions like process creation, network connections and more, through the simple configuration of a JSON file.”
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