Hayabusa is a Windows event log fast forensics timeline generator and threat hunting tool created by the Yamato Security group in Japan. Hayabusa means "peregrine falcon" in Japanese and was chosen as peregrine falcons are the fastest animal in the world, great at hunting and highly trainable. It is written in Rust and supports multi-threading in order to be as fast as possible. We have provided a tool to convert sigma rules into hayabusa rule format. The hayabusa detection rules, like sigma, are also written in YML in order to be as easily customizable and extensible as possible. It can be run either on running systems for live analysis or by gathering logs from multiple systems for offline analysis. (At the moment, it does not support real-time alerting or periodic scans.) The output will be consolidated into a single CSV timeline for easy analysis in Excel or Timeline Explorer.

About Hayabusa
- Table of Contents
- Main Goals
  - Threat Hunting
  - Fast Forensics Timeline Generation
Screenshots
Sample Timeline Results
Features
Planned Features
Downloads
Compiling From Source (Optional)
Running Hayabusa
Usage
- Command Line Options
- Usage Examples
Testing Hayabusa on Sample Evtx Files
Hayabusa Output
- Progress Bar
- Color Output
Hayabusa Rules
Other Windows Event Log Analyzers and Related Projects
- Comparison To Other Similar Tools
Community Documentation
- English
- Japanese
Contribution
Bug Submission
License

Main Goals

Threat Hunting

Hayabusa currently has over 1300 sigma rules and around 70 hayabusa rules with more rules being added regularly. The ultimate goal is to be able to push out hayabusa agents to all Windows endpoints after an incident or for periodic threat hunting and have them alert back to a central server.

Fast Forensics Timeline Generation

Windows event log analysis has traditionally been a very long and tedious process because Windows event logs are 1) in a data format that is hard to analyze and 2) the majority of data is noise and not useful for investigations. Hayabusa's main goal is to extract out only useful data and present it in an easy-to-read format that is usable not only by professionally trained analysts but any Windows system administrator. Hayabusa is not intended to be a replacement for tools like Evtx Explorer or Event Log Explorer for more deep-dive analysis but is intended for letting analysts get 80% of their work done in 20% of the time.

Screenshots

Startup

Terminal Output

Results Summary

Analysis in Excel

Analysis in Timeline Explorer

Critical Alert Filtering and Computer Grouping in Timeline Explorer

Sample Timeline Results

You can check out sample CSV timelines here.

You can learn how to analyze CSV timelines in Excel and Timeline Explorer here.

Features

Cross-platform support: Windows, Linux, macOS.
Developed in Rust to be memory safe and faster than a hayabusa falcon!
Multi-thread support delivering up to a 5x speed improvement.
Creates a single easy-to-analyze CSV timeline for forensic investigations and incident response.
Threat hunting based on IoC signatures written in easy to read/create/edit YML based hayabusa rules.
Sigma rule support to convert sigma rules to hayabusa rules.
Currently it supports the most sigma rules compared to other similar tools and even supports count rules.
Event log statistics. (Useful for getting a picture of what types of events there are and for tuning your log settings.)
Rule tuning configuration by excluding unneeded or noisy rules.
MITRE ATT&CK mapping of tactics (only in saved CSV files).

Planned Features

Enterprise-wide hunting on all endpoints.
Japanese language support.
MITRE ATT&CK heatmap generation.
User logon and failed logon summary.
Input from JSON logs.
JSON support for sending alerts to Elastic Stack/Splunk, etc...

Downloads

You can download the latest stable version of hayabusa with compiled binaries from the Releases page.

You can also git clone the repository with the following command and compile binary from source code:

git clone https://github.com/Yamato-Security/hayabusa.git --recursive

Note: If you forget to use --recursive option, the rules folder, which is managed as a git submodule, will not be cloned.

You can sync the rules folder and get latest Hayabusa rules with git pull --recurse-submodules or use the following command:

hayabusa.exe -u

If the update fails, you may need to rename the rules folder and try again.

Compiling From Source (Optional)

If you have Rust installed, you can compile from source with the following command:

cargo clean
cargo build --release

Be sure to periodically update Rust with:

rustup update stable

The compiled binary will be outputted in the target/release folder.

Cross-compiling 32-bit Windows Binaries

You can create 32-bit binaries on 64-bit Windows systems with the following:

rustup install stable-i686-pc-windows-msvc
rustup target add i686-pc-windows-msvc
rustup run stable-i686-pc-windows-msvc cargo build --release

macOS Compiling Notes

If you receive compile errors about openssl, you will need to install Homebrew and then install the following packages:

brew install pkg-config
brew install openssl

Linux Compiling Notes

If you receive compile errors about openssl, you will need to install the following package.

Ubuntu-based distros:

sudo apt install libssl-dev

Fedora-based distros:

sudo yum install openssl-devel

Advanced: Updating Rust Packages

You can update to the latest Rust crates before compiling to get the latest libraries:

cargo update

Please let us know if anything breaks after you update.

Running Hayabusa

Caution: Anti-Virus/EDR Warnings

You may receive warning from anti-virus or EDR when trying to run hayabusa. These are false positives so you may need to configure your security products to allow running hayabusa. If you are worried about malware, please check the hayabusa source code and compile the binaries yourself.

Windows

In Command Prompt or Windows Terminal, just run 32-bit or 64-bit Windoows binary from the hayabusa root directory. Example: hayabusa-1.2.0-windows-x64.exe

Caution: Windows Terminal Bug

As of Feb 1, 2022, Windows Terminal will freeze midway when displaying results to the screen when run against the sample evtx files. This is because there is a control code (0x9D) in the output. This is known Windows Terminal bug which will eventually be fixed but for the meantime, you can avoid this bug by adding the -c (colored output) option when you run hayabusa.

Linux

You first need to make the binary executable.

chmod +x ./hayabusa-1.2.0-linux-x64

Then run it from the Hayabusa root directory:

./hayabusa-1.2.0-linux-x64

macOS

From Terminal or iTerm2, you first need to make the binary executable.

chmod +x ./hayabusa-1.2.0-mac-intel

Then, try to run it from the Hayabusa root directory:

./hayabusa-1.2.0-mac-intel

On the latest version of macOS, you may receive the following security error when you try to run it:

Click "Cancel" and then from System Preferences, open "Security & Privacy" and from the General tab, click "Allow Anyway".

After that, try to run it again.

./hayabusa-1.2.0-mac-intel

The following warning will pop up, so please click "Open".

You should now be able to run hayabusa.

Usage

Command Line Options

USAGE:
    -d --directory=[DIRECTORY] 'Directory of multiple .evtx files.'
    -f --filepath=[FILEPATH] 'File path to one .evtx file.'
    -r --rules=[RULEFILE/RULEDIRECTORY] 'Rule file or directory. (Default: ./rules)'
    -c --color 'Output with color. (Terminal needs to support True Color.)'
    -C --config=[RULECONFIGDIRECTORY] 'Rule config folder. (Default: ./rules/config)'
    -o --output=[CSV_TIMELINE] 'Save the timeline in CSV format. (Example: results.csv)'
    -v --verbose 'Output verbose information.'
    -D --enable-deprecated-rules 'Enable rules marked as deprecated.'
    -n --enable-noisy-rules 'Enable rules marked as noisy.'
    -u --update-rules 'Update to the latest rules in the hayabusa-rules github repository.'
    -m --min-level=[LEVEL] 'Minimum level for rules. (Default: informational)'
    -l --live-analysis 'Analyze the local C:\Windows\System32\winevt\Logs folder (Windows Only. Administrator privileges required.)'
    --start-timeline=[STARTTIMELINE] 'Start time of the event logs to load. (Example: '2018/11/28 12:00:00 +09:00')'
    --end-timeline=[ENDTIMELINE] 'End time of the event logs to load. (Example: '2018/11/28 12:00:00 +09:00')'
    --rfc-2822 'Output date and time in RFC 2822 format. (Example: Mon, 07 Aug 2006 12:34:56 -0600)'
    --rfc-3339 'Output date and time in RFC 3339 format. (Example: 2006-08-07T12:34:56.485214 -06:00)'
    -U --utc 'Output time in UTC format. (Default: local time)'
    -t --thread-number=[NUMBER] 'Thread number. (Default: Optimal number for performance.)'
    -s --statistics 'Prints statistics of event IDs.'
    -q --quiet 'Quiet mode. Do not display the launch banner.'
    -Q --quiet-errors 'Quiet errors mode. Do not save error logs.'
    --contributors 'Prints the list of contributors.'

Usage Examples

Run hayabusa against one Windows event log file:

hayabusa.exe -f eventlog.evtx

Run hayabusa against the sample-evtx directory with multiple Windows event log files:

hayabusa.exe -d .\hayabusa-sample-evtx

Export to a single CSV file for further analysis with excel or timeline explorer:

hayabusa.exe -d .\hayabusa-sample-evtx -o results.csv

Only run hayabusa rules (the default is to run all the rules in -r .\rules):

hayabusa.exe -d .\hayabusa-sample-evtx -r .\rules\hayabusa -o results.csv

Only run hayabusa rules for logs that are enabled by default on Windows:

hayabusa.exe -d .\hayabusa-sample-evtx -r .\rules\hayabusa\default -o results.csv

Only run hayabusa rules for sysmon logs:

hayabusa.exe -d .\hayabusa-sample-evtx -r .\rules\hayabusa\sysmon -o results.csv

Only run sigma rules:

hayabusa.exe -d .\hayabusa-sample-evtx -r .\rules\sigma -o results.csv

Enable deprecated rules (those with status marked as deprecated) and noisy rules (those whose rule ID is listed in .\rules\config\noisy_rules.txt):

hayabusa.exe -d .\hayabusa-sample-evtx --enable-noisy-rules --enable-deprecated-rules -o results.csv

Only run rules to analyze logons and output in the UTC timezone:

hayabusa.exe -d .\hayabusa-sample-evtx -r .\rules\hayabusa\default\events\Security\Logons -U -o results.csv

Run on a live Windows machine (requires Administrator privileges) and only detect alerts (potentially malicious behavior):

hayabusa.exe -l -m low

Get event ID statistics:

hayabusa.exe -f Security.evtx -s

Print verbose information (useful for determining which files take long to process, parsing errors, etc...):

hayabusa.exe -d .\hayabusa-sample-evtx -v

Verbose output example:

Checking target evtx FilePath: "./hayabusa-sample-evtx/YamatoSecurity/T1027.004_Obfuscated Files or Information\u{a0}Compile After Delivery/sysmon.evtx"
1 / 509 [>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------] 0.20 % 1s 
Checking target evtx FilePath: "./hayabusa-sample-evtx/YamatoSecurity/T1558.004_Steal or Forge Kerberos Tickets AS-REP Roasting/Security.evtx"
2 / 509 [>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------] 0.39 % 1s 
Checking target evtx FilePath: "./hayabusa-sample-evtx/YamatoSecurity/T1558.003_Steal or Forge Kerberos Tickets\u{a0}Kerberoasting/Security.evtx"
3 / 509 [>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------] 0.59 % 1s 
Checking target evtx FilePath: "./hayabusa-sample-evtx/YamatoSecurity/T1197_BITS Jobs/Windows-BitsClient.evtx"
4 / 509 [=>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------] 0.79 % 1s 
Checking target evtx FilePath: "./hayabusa-sample-evtx/YamatoSecurity/T1218.004_Signed Binary Proxy Execution\u{a0}InstallUtil/sysmon.evtx"
5 / 509 [=>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------] 0.98 % 1s

Quiet error mode: By default, hayabusa will save error messages to error log files. If you do not want to save error messages, please add -Q.

Testing Hayabusa on Sample Evtx Files

We have provided some sample evtx files for you to test hayabusa and/or create new rules at https://github.com/Yamato-Security/hayabusa-sample-evtx

You can download the sample evtx files to a new hayabusa-sample-evtx sub-directory with the following command:

git clone https://github.com/Yamato-Security/hayabusa-sample-evtx.git

Note: You need to run the binary from the Hayabusa root directory.

Hayabusa Output

When hayabusa output is being displayed to the screen (the default), it will display the following information:

Timestamp: Default is YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss.sss +hh:mm format. This comes from the <Event><System><TimeCreated SystemTime> field in the event log. The default timezone will be the local timezone but you can change the timezone to UTC with the --utc option.
Computer: This comes from the <Event><System><Computer> field in the event log.
Event ID: This comes from the <Event><System><EventID> field in the event log.
Level: This comes from the level field in the YML detection rule. (informational, low, medium, high, critical) By default, all level alerts will be displayed but you can set the minimum level with -m. For example, you can set -m high) in order to only scan for and display high and critical alerts.
Title: This comes from the title field in the YML detection rule.
Details: This comes from the details field in the YML detection rule, however, only hayabusa rules have this field. This field gives extra information about the alert or event and can extract useful data from the <Event><System><EventData> portion of the log. For example, usernames, command line information, process information, etc...

When saving to a CSV file an additional two fields will be added:

Rule Path: The path to the detection rule that generated the alert or event.
File Path: The path to the evtx file that caused the alert or event.

Progress Bar

The progress bar will only work with multiple evtx files. It will display in real time the number and percent of evtx files that it has finished analyzing.

Color Output

You can output the alerts in color based on the alert level by specifying -c or --color. You can change the default colors in the config file at ./config/level_color.txt in the format of level,(RGB 6-digit ColorHex). Note: Color can only be displayed in terminals that support True Color. Example: Windows Terminal or iTerm2 for macOS.

Hayabusa Rules

Hayabusa detection rules are written in a sigma-like YML format and are located in the rules folder. In the future, we plan to host the rules at https://github.com/Yamato-Security/hayabusa-rules so please send any issues and pull requests for rules there instead of the main hayabusa repository.

Please read the hayabusa-rules repository README to understand about the rule format and how to create rules.

All of the rules from the hayabusa-rules repository should be placed in the rules folder. informational level rules are considered events, while anything with a level of low and higher are considered alerts.

The hayabusa rule directory structure is separated into 3 directories:

default: logs that are turned on in Windows by default.
non-default: logs that need to be turned on through group policy, security baselines, etc...
sysmon: logs that are generated by sysmon.
testing: a temporary directory to put rules that you are currently testing

Rules are further seperated into directories by log type (Example: Security, System, etc...) and are named in the following format:

Alert format: <EventID>_<MITRE ATT&CK Name>_<Description>.yml
Alert example: 1102_IndicatorRemovalOnHost-ClearWindowsEventLogs_SecurityLogCleared.yml
Event format: <EventID>_<Description>.yml
Event example: 4776_NTLM-LogonToLocalAccount.yml

Please check out the current rules to use as a template in creating new ones or for checking the detection logic.

Hayabusa v.s. Converted Sigma Rules

Sigma rules need to first be converted to hayabusa rule format explained here. Hayabusa rules are designed solely for Windows event log analysis and have the following benefits:

An extra details field to display additional information taken from only the useful fields in the log.
They are all tested against sample logs and are known to work.

Some sigma rules may not work as intended due to bugs in the conversion process, unsupported features, or differences in implementation (such as in regular expressions).

Limitations: To our knowledge, hayabusa provides the greatest support for sigma rules out of any open source Windows event log analysis tool, however, there are still rules that are not supported:

Rules that use regular expressions that do not work with the Rust regex crate
Aggregation expressions besides count in the sigma rule specification.

Note: the limitation is in the sigma rule converter and not in hayabusa itself.

Detection Rule Tuning

Like firewalls and IDSes, any signature-based tool will require some tuning to fit your environment so you may need to permanently or temporarily exclude certain rules.

You can add a rule ID (Example: 4fe151c2-ecf9-4fae-95ae-b88ec9c2fca6) to rules/config/exclude_rules.txt in order to ignore any rule that you do not need or cannot be used.

You can also add a rule ID to rules/config/noisy_rules.txt in order to ignore the rule by default but still be able to use the rule with the -n or --enable-noisy-rules option.

Event ID Filtering

You can filter on event IDs by placing event ID numbers in config/target_eventids.txt. This will increase performance so it is recommended if you only need to search for certain IDs.

We have provided a sample ID filter list at config/target_eventids_sample.txt created from the EventID fields in all of the rules as well as IDs seen in actual results.

Please use this list if you want the best performance but be aware that there is a slight possibility for missing events (false negatives).

Detection Level Tuning

The Hayabusa rule and Sigma rule determine the threat level when each author detects it. To set the user to their own threat level, write the conversion information in ./config/level_tuning.txt and execute hayabusa --level-tuning to rewrite the rule file. Please note that the rule file will be rewritten directly.

./config/level_tuning.txt Sample

id,new_level
00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000,informational # sample level tuning line

The threat level of the rule corresponding to 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 in the rules directory is rewritten to informational.

There is no "one tool to rule them all" and we have found that each has its own merits so we recommend checking out these other great tools and projects and seeing which ones you like.

APT-Hunter - Attack detection tool written in Python.
Awesome Event IDs - Collection of Event ID resources useful for Digital Forensics and Incident Response
Chainsaw - A similar sigma-based attack detection tool written in Rust.
DeepBlueCLI - Attack detection tool written in Powershell by Eric Conrad.
Epagneul - Graph visualization for Windows event logs.
EventList - Map security baseline event IDs to MITRE ATT&CK by Miriam Wiesner.
EvtxECmd - Evtx parser by Eric Zimmerman.
EVTXtract - Recover EVTX log files from unallocated space and memory images.
EvtxToElk - Python tool to send Evtx data to Elastic Stack.
EVTX ATTACK Samples - EVTX attack sample event log files by SBousseaden.
EVTX-to-MITRE-Attack - Another great repository of EVTX attack sample logs mapped to ATT&CK.
EVTX parser - the Rust library we used written by @OBenamram.
LogonTracer - A graphical interface to visualize logons to detect lateral movement by JPCERTCC.
RustyBlue - Rust port of DeepBlueCLI by Yamato Security.
Sigma - Community based generic SIEM rules.
so-import-evtx - Import evtx files into Security Onion.
SysmonTools - Configuration and off-line log visualization tool for Sysmon.
Timeline Explorer - The best CSV timeline analyzer by Eric Zimmerman.
Windows Event Log Analysis - Analyst Reference - by Forward Defense's Steve Anson.
WELA (Windows Event Log Analyzer) - The swiff-army knife for Windows event logs by Yamato Security
Zircolite - Sigma-based attack detection tool written in Python.

Comparison To Other Similar Tools

Please understand that it is not possible to do a perfect comparison as results will differ based on the target sample data, command-line options, rule tuning, etc... In our tests, we have found hayabusa to support the largest number of sigma rules compared to other similar tools while still maintaining very fast speeds and does not require a great amount of memory.

The following benchmarks were taken on a Lenovo P51 based on approximately 500 evtx files (130MB) from our sample-evtx repository at 2021/12/23 with hayabusa version 1.0.0.

	Elapsed Time	Memory Usage	Unique Sigma Rules With Detections
Chainsaw	7.5 seconds	75 MB	170
Hayabusa	7.8 seconds	340 MB (memory usage depends on the amount of alerts)	267
Zircolite	34 seconds	380 MB (normally requires 3 times the size of the log files)	237

With hayabusa rules enabled, it will detect around 300 unique alerts and events.
When tested on many event logs files totaling 7.5 GB, it finished in under 7 minutes and used around 1 GB of memory. The amount of memory consumed is based on the size of the results, not on the size of the target evtx files.
It is the only tool that provides a consolidated single CSV timeline to analysis in tools like Timeline Explorer.

Community Documentation

English

2022/01/24 Graphing Hayabusa results in neo4j by Matthew Seyer (@forensic_matt)

Japanese

2022/01/22 Visualizing Hayabusa results in Elastic Stack by @kzzzzo2
2021/12/31 Intro to Hayabusa by itiB (@itiB_S144)
2021/12/27 Hayabusa internals by Kazuminn (@k47_um1n)

Contribution

We would love any form of contribution. Pull requests, rule creation and sample evtx logs are the best but feature requests, notifying us of bugs, etc... are also very welcome.

At the least, if you like our tool then please give us a star on Github and show your support!

Bug Submission

Please submit any bugs you find here. This project is currently actively maintained and we are happy to fix any bugs reported.

License

Hayabusa is released under GPLv3 and all rules are released under the Detection Rule License (DRL) 1.1.

README.md

About Hayabusa

Table of Contents