How do you monitor your homelab network for internal attackers? E.g. you have a publicly available service and theres a vulnerability that you miss or you pull a bad update and suddenly someone has access to your VM/machine/container. How could you increase the chances of automatically detecting that?

The built in IDS in opnsense seems pretty useless, and doesn’t really help detect if e.g. someone is trying to exploit services between your vlans (I could be using it wrong though).

Crowdsec in opnsense is nice but it seems to also be primarily for protecting from malicious actors coming from the WAN.

I’ve heard about the opnsense zenarmor plugin but you have to agree to a privacy policy to use it?

Another option I guess would be collecting firewall logs and making custom notifications for things that you think would be suspicious on your network.

I also know update cooldowns and not exposing anything could largely solve this too, but the monitoring and alerting question really interests me.

  • Mikelius@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    9 hours ago

    This is exactly how my network is setup. All devices log to my syslog server which I feed into a database with a self made python app, and Grafana goes from there. It’s been running nonstop for like 5 years without any problems, so I’d say your in the right path!

    It’s also helped me catch things like:

    • finding out android leaked IPs outside VPN tunnels on connect (prior to headlines claiming this)
    • finding out nslookup on termux ignores the phone’s DNS settings and tries to use Google instead
    • finding other devices that ignore my DNS server settings
    • noticing that my work Mac will turn itself on in some weird silent passive mode in the middle of the night to try and send data to apple (sleep or powered off don’t matter) - caught this from the logs sent by my router