Mozilla is working on a defense platform to automate the handling of security incidents, and to enable the use of incident handlers. Why not create tools for defence - the attackers have plenty!?

The Mozilla Defense Platform (MozDef) is still at the early proof of concept stage, according to the documentation, but you can check it out in its current form on GitHub.

The announcement about it in the Readme on Github says that “the inspiration for MozDef comes from the large arsenal of tools available to attackers. Suites like metasploit, armitage, lair, dradis and others are readily available to help attackers coordinate, share intelligence and finely tune their attacks in real time.” In contrast, defenders are usually limited to wikis, ticketing systems and manual tracking databases attached to the end of a Security Information Event Management (SIEM) system.

When it is finalized, MozDef will provide a more automated platform. The goals of the team working on MozDef are that it will allow defenders to rapidly discover and respond to security incidents, and will also automate interfaces to other systems like bunker, banhammer, and mig. Incident handlers will be able to use it for real-time collaboration, and for repeatable, predictable processes for incident handling. The platform is designed to go beyond traditional SIEM systems in automating incident handling, information sharing, workflow, metrics and response automation.

In order to do this it will provide traditional SIEM functionality including:

• Accepting events/logs from your systems
• Storing the events/logs
• Facilitating searches
• Facilitating alerting
• Facilitating log management (archiving,restoration)

In technical terms, input will be in JSON format, and you’ll have open access to your data. It will integrate with a variety of log shippers including heka, logstash, beaver, nxlog and any shipper that can send JSON to either rabbit-mq or an HTTP endpoint.

The developers plan to provide easy python plugins to manipulate your data in transit, and to give real-time access to teams of incident responders to allow each other to see their work simultaneously.

This is a good idea. Why not weaponize the defence in response to the attack? The only question is will this be another Mozilla project that fades way and does it go far enough?