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Real-time scanning, what is it and how do I configure it?

Real-time scanning is only available to customers with Patchman CLEAN.

What is real-time scanning?

Traditionally, Patchman mainly performs daily scans to find vulnerabilities and malware on your server. With the addition of real-time scanning, Patchman is able to monitor all file changes for all websites in real time. This means that as soon as a file is created or modified, Patchman immediately scans the file and is able to take appropriate action if necessary.

How does real-time scanning benefit me?

Our traditional scanning approach is optimized for vulnerability scanning. Vulnerabilities don’t suddenly appear on your server - instead, they are usually there for some time in a file, until someone discovers that that file actually contains a vulnerability. Our traditional scanning mechanism is able to very quickly find out which files on your server are vulnerable once such a new vulnerability is discovered, due to our combination of daily scanning, intelligent ad hoc scanning and file state caching.

Malware, however, usually appears suddenly. Relying on daily scanning here means that a malware file can be on your server for hours before we find it, and in many cases, the damage of that malware has already been done. For this reason, we need to be able to find out about a file as soon as it appears, so that we can immediately scan it for malware, and don’t have to wait for the next daily scan.

The real-time scanning in Patchman relies on the Linux Audit Framework, which keeps track of all file changes across your entire server. As soon as a file change is spotted that we are interested in, the file is scanned by Patchman. If the file indeed contains malware, the appropriate remediation action will be taken immediately, per your policy configuration.

While this mechanism can also pick up vulnerabilities faster, we don’t consider this to be an impactful application of real-time scanning. It is thus primarily of use for malware detection, which is why it is a part of our advanced malware remediation package, Patchman CLEAN.

How do I enable real-time scanning?

For technical reasons, a key piece of functionality has to be installed separately from the main patchman-client package. Our automatic installation script can handle this for you, both on new servers and those that already have Patchman installed. Simply re-run the command listed in the Portal (under Servers -> Add Server) and you will be asked whether you want real-time scanning enabled.

CODE
Do you also want to use real-time scanning? (Note this feature requires a plan that supports real-time scanning.)

Install? [y/N]

Real-time scanning will automatically start within 5 minutes of this installation.

What is required for real-time scanning?

This feature requires the Linux Audit Framework to be enabled, which is part of the Linux kernel by default on all our supported distributions. It might be disabled if you use a custom kernel; in that case, refer to your compilation parameters.

Most configurations (including defaults) for the Linux Audit Framework are safe to use with Patchman real-time scanning. However, if you have customized it, we strongly recommend you check the following 2 settings:

  • Depending on your distribution, check /etc/audit/auditd.conf or /etc/audispd/audispd.conf for a setting called overflow_action. The values ignore or syslog are safe. We do not support this value being set to suspend, single or halt.

  • Check the output of the command auditctl -s, and verify that the line starting with failure is set to either 0 or 1. We do not support this value being set to 2.

Configuring the above against our recommendations would risk inadvertent halting or suspension of your server as an unwanted side effect, and as such we strongly advise against such configuration if you are using Patchman real-time scanning. We can’t provide support for problems of any sorts if your configuration goes against the above recommendations.

Which limitations does real-time scanning have?

In our initial release, real-time scanning is not always able to properly resolve events in chrooted environments. The most common scenario affected by this is uploading a file by FTP, if the FTP daemon is configured to use chroots, as is common across control panel software. We are currently working on improvements in our next release which will capture such events correctly.

If you are unsure whether our implementation is catching or missing events, feel free to contact us so we can take a look if we can do more to improve our solution for your needs!


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