Remove SA-EVENTGEN Data

[glancaster]

I enabled SA-Eventgen for my ES App and now I have many faux security events. This seems to be a demo to fill the dashboard with events. I have since disabled the SA. I can't seem to drill down into them to find them in my indexes. I am looking for a way to identify and remove this data completely.

[ITCrowd]

I installed ESS on Windows, and had an issue with the EventGen starting by default. Unfortunately once data is in Splunk, it's in Splunk. On a positive note, the inability to remove logs ensures data integrity of your logs. You don't want people to manipulate logs once in Splunk.

[LukeMurphey]

@glancaster: a couple things could happen:

1) Some dashboards may show odd results. For example, a panel may report on hosts with old anti-virus client versions that don't appear to exist (because they were host created by EventGen).

2) You may get some alerts from the correlation searches that are based on old EventGen data.

The best practice is remove and re-install ES. If you aren't noticing anything strange and you are already using ES, then you may just want to stick with your current install. You'll probably be just fine.

[glancaster]

@LukeMurphey could you please elaborate on how that could cause proplems elsewhere? I use the command on my test box often without incident and there isn't much documentation on it so I would like to know the best practice in this situation.

I understand about the summary indexing and how the eventgetn data has to trickle out of my ES dashboards once it is reported in there. Thanks in advance.

[LukeMurphey]

@glancaster: manually deleting events might cause problems elsewhere. ES uses summary indexing and lookups that contain event data. Thus, you may get experience some odd results in some dashboards until some time has gone by.

[glancaster]

Actually I found out there is a way once you have SA-EventGen disabled, here is how I did it using an account that has the "can_delete" role:

1) in the search app, select a timerange just greater than the time you had the SA-Eventgen operating for, and search for "index=*".(You will now have all results from the time range that include legitimate results and results from the SA-EventGen)

2)Filter out and exclude all legitimate sources and hosts so that you are only left with the phony SA-EventGen data.

3) pipe the results to delete