What is Wazuh: An Open Source Platform for Modern Cybersecurity

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Cybersecurity has become an essential priority for companies of all sizes. In the digital world, threats evolve at a dizzying pace, requiring the search for effective solutions that detect, prevent, and respond to any intrusion attempt. Those who manage IT infrastructures are looking for tools that are powerful, flexible, and, if possible, free from the constraints that expensive commercial licenses often entail.

Among the different options available, Wazuh has been gaining ground until it became a reference for those who want to protect their systems in an intelligent and economical way.This open-source platform combines the best of several security technologies into a single solution, suitable for both startups and large corporations.

What is Wazuh and why is it relevant in cybersecurity?

Wazuh is a comprehensive open-source cybersecurity platform focused on protecting IT infrastructures, whether on-premises, virtualized, containerized, or cloud environments. Since its inception in 2015 as an evolution of the well-known OSSEC, Wazuh has grown to become a leading tool, with a growing community of users and developers focused on offering accessible and powerful security.

Wazuh's main function is to act as a HIDS (Host-based Intrusion Detection System), that is, an intrusion detection system that is installed directly on the devices to be monitored. This allows you to thoroughly analyze the behavior, logs, file integrity, and configuration of each system to detect any suspicious attempts at unauthorized access, malware, or tampering.

But Wazuh does not limit itself to the functions of a HIDS. Thanks to its continuous evolution and integration with technologies such as SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and XDR (Extended Detection and Response), the platform is capable of collecting, correlating and analyzing security data from multiple sources, generating alerts, actively responding to incidents and helping to comply with regulations such as GDPR or PCI DSS.

Wazuh Architecture and Components

To understand the power of Wazuh, it is important to understand how its architecture is structured. The solution consists mainly of four key elements:

• Agents: They are installed on end devices (PCs, servers, virtual machines, cloud instances, etc.) and are responsible for collecting security data, analyzing events, monitoring file integrity, and running scheduled analysis and protection tasks.
• Server: It receives information from all agents, processing and analyzing it using decoders and rules that allow it to identify anomalous patterns or threats. This component manages the agents, updates them remotely, and can scale horizontally in cluster mode to serve large infrastructures.
• Indexer: Based on robust large-scale search and analytics technology, it stores and indexes all alerts and events sent by the server in JSON format, enabling rapid searches, correlation, and long-term log retention.
• Dashboard: It is the web interface where users can view all collected data and analyze it in real time, configure rules, generate reports, and access advanced features to manage the platform.

One of Wazuh's greatest strengths is its ability to be deployed in both simple architectures and large distributed clusters, allowing it to scale based on each organization's needs.

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What features does Wazuh offer?

Wazuh stands out for its wide range of features, which cover virtually all modern cybersecurity protection, visibility, and response needs.

• Log and event analysis: Agents collect detailed information from systems and applications in real time, securely sending this data to the server for analysis.
• File Integrity Monitoring (FIM): Constantly monitors the most critical folders and files, detecting changes in content, permissions, or ownership that could indicate tampering or attacks.
• Security Configuration Assessment (SCA): It performs automatic scans of system and application configurations, ensuring they comply with industry best practices and regulations, and alerts you to any deviations.
• Malware and Threat Detection: Uses detection rules, threat intelligence, and known IOC indicators to identify suspicious behavior.
• CVE Vulnerability Detection and Management: Agents generate reports that help identify, visualize, and quickly address known vulnerabilities in systems by correlating software inventory with constantly updated vulnerability databases.
• Active incident response: It not only detects, but can also automatically execute corrective actions against ongoing threats (e.g., blocking a process, isolating a computer, launching scripts, etc.).
• Agentless Monitoring: In addition to agent-based protection, it allows for the integration of devices that cannot install software, such as firewalls, switches, routers, or network intrusion detection systems (NIDS), expanding security coverage.
• Security for hybrid and cloud environments: It facilitates the integration and monitoring of cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, or Microsoft 365, also monitoring Docker containers and virtualized systems, providing complete visibility into modern infrastructures.
• Normative compliance: Provides specific controls and modules to help meet regulatory requirements such as GDPR, NIST, TSC, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and others, providing audit-ready evidence and reporting.
• Forensic analysis and traceability: It centrally stores all relevant data, enabling in-depth investigations of security incidents and facilitating subsequent audits.
• IT Inventory and Health: Build an up-to-date inventory of all monitored assets, facilitating management, compliance, and response to vulnerabilities.

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What differentiates Wazuh from other IDS and SIEMs?

Wazuh emerged as an evolution of a need: to offer a powerful and flexible solution without relying on expensive proprietary licenses. But its unique value lies in several key aspects:

• Open source nature: It allows any organization to install, adapt, and customize the platform to suit their needs, while also saving costs and avoiding the dreaded vendor lock-in that is common with commercial solutions.
• Active and growing community: As an open project, the community contributes rules, improvements, and support, accelerating innovation and facilitating collaboration.
• Multi platform: It supports a wide variety of operating systems, including Linux, Windows, macOS, AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX, ensuring coverage in heterogeneous environments.
• Scalability: Its architecture supports everything from small to large-scale deployments, enabling the creation of distributed clusters for large organizations.
• Integration with Elastic Stack: It provides a powerful layer of visual analytics, with ready-to-use dashboards, reporting, and advanced alert management.
• Detailed monitoring of cloud infrastructure and containers: It goes beyond the traditional IDS concept, providing visibility and protection in natively digital and distributed environments.
• Response automation: Integrates XDR capabilities to orchestrate automated responses, improving the speed of reaction to incidents.

To better understand how protection technologies are advancing in modern environments, we recommend reviewing what cloud security is.

Most relevant use cases of Wazuh

Wazuh's functionalities allow it to be implemented in a wide variety of real-world scenarios within companies.

• Endpoint protection: It allows you to monitor, analyze, and respond to security threats on computers and servers, both local and cloud-based.
• Compliance audit: Facilitates the generation of automatic reports to demonstrate compliance with standards and regulations.
• Advanced Attack Detection: By correlating events and using threat intelligence, you can identify sophisticated penetration attempts or lateral movement.
• Security in cloud and container environments: Provides visibility into the behavior of hosts and containers (Docker, Kubernetes), detecting vulnerabilities and anomalies in these environments.
• Centralized alert management: Unifies security information from different environments into a single dashboard, facilitating incident investigation and prioritization.

SIEM and XDR: Wazuh's leap toward comprehensive protection

One of Wazuh's great virtues lies in the integration of SIEM and XDR technologies. But what does this mean exactly?

SIEM (Security Information and Event Management): It focuses on collecting and analyzing security information from multiple sources (system logs, applications, networks, devices, etc.), correlating this data to identify malicious patterns and generating automatic alerts.

XDR (Extended Detection and Response): It goes a step further by extending the scope of monitoring and integration to endpoints, servers, networks, clouds, and even applications, orchestrating automated responses and streamlining investigations into complex attacks.

Wazuh incorporates both technologies, allowing security teams to act proactively. With the complete visibility it provides and the automation of responses, reaction times are reduced and the ability to quickly contain any incident is improved.

Installation and Operation on a daily basis

Installing and commissioning Wazuh is remarkably simple compared to other similar solutions. Thanks to its open source nature, documentation is public and abundant, and there is also a very active community that provides support and advice.

Deployment can be tailored to each environment: from small installations on a single physical or virtual server to complex clusters managing thousands of endpoints, integrated with cloud platforms, or with devices without the ability to install agents.

Daily maintenance is one of the aspects most valued by users. Centralized management from the dashboard and the automation of many routine tasks (updates, notifications, event correlation) minimize the effort required by the security team compared to other alternatives.

Furthermore, regular updates and the constant addition of new features allow us to keep security at the forefront, without relying on long commercial development cycles.

Main benefits and advantages of Wazuh

Choosing Wazuh as a cybersecurity solution offers many advantages over proprietary products.

• Significant cost savings: Being open source, the solution is completely free and does not require purchasing licenses, making it especially attractive for organizations with limited resources.
• full flexibility: The code can be customized or adapted to fit the specific requirements of each environment.
• Update and community support: An active international community keeps development alive and offers help with problem-solving and queries.
• Integration power: Compatible with third-party tools and major cloud and infrastructure providers, making it easy to unify security in complex environments.
• Global security visibility: It allows you to monitor all critical points of your infrastructure in real time and from a single visual dashboard, facilitating better risk and threat management.

To learn more about how to protect your systems with open solutions, you can also read about cloud security.

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