Bro News #7

Welcome to the Bro newsletter #7. This time we cover the following topics:

• Bro Events.
• Bro Commits: Bro v2.5 beta is here. Get your newest Bro with new features and improvements.
• Bro Internals: Give Bro a future, join the Future Fund.

Bro Events

BroCon 2016

BroCon 2016 was hosted by TACC in Austin, Texas. About 20 hours of talks within two and a half days, we had talks from Bro team members about the newest developments, low level practical talks to improve every day work life, and also high level research talks. The new SMB analyzer seems to have had the most impact on the user community. You can read all about here.

We hear you: Our post-conference attendee survey had over 90% who liked
the topics, and over 95% that they liked the way those topics were
presented. Overall, we appreciate all of the feedback that we received, and
while we were blown away by the overwhelmingly positive response, perhaps
even more important to us are the opportunities for making BroCon even
better. We’ll keep all of the feedback in mind as we start the process of
preparing for BroCon 2017. We had a few comments regarding the lack of
talks discussing incident response. If those types of talks interest you,
please consider attending Bro4Pros 2017, as that event tends to have more
talks about “life in the trenches.”

NSF Cybersecurity Summit 2016

Bro held a one day workshop at the NSF Cybersecurity Summit 2016.

Bro Commits: Bro 2.5 beta is here!

Bro 2.5 beta has been released. Here is a brief summary of some of the new features and improvements:

• Bro now includes the NetControl framework. This framework allows easy interaction with hard- and software switches, firewalls, etc. 
• Support for the SMB protocol (SMB1 and SMB2), including GSSAPI and NTLM.
• Support for the remote framebuffer protocol (RFB), that is used by VNC servers for remote graphical display.
• The Intelligence framework was refactored and extended. It now supports, for example subnet indicators and item deletion/expiration.

Binary packages of the beta are also available. See NEWS for preliminary release notes and CHANGES for the exhaustive commit list. Feedback is encouraged and should be sent to the Bro mailing list. As previously stated, we do not recommend using a beta release for production use.

Bro Internals: Give Bro a future, join the Future Fund.

Bro’s future depends on all of you. The Bro community is a wonderful mix of different personalities and skill sets. Many of them will answer all Bro related questions in our IRC channel #bro on Freenode, and for a while now also in our Bro channel on Gitter. Others contribute to the development of Bro. We want to thank everyone who contributes to Bro in any way. We also would like to send out a call to join the Bro Future Fund, so we can continue all the work that cannot be done by volunteers only. If you appreciate Bro in your daily work and think your company or organization truly benefits from it consider a donation to help us keep up the work.

In that spirit, Corelight (formerly known as Broala) announced a donation of $100,000 at BroCon 2016. Thank you Corelight!