Sysmon for Linux is a tool that monitors and logs system activity including process lifetime, network connections, file system writes, and more. Sysmon works across reboots and uses advanced filtering to help identify malicious activity as well as how intruders and malware operate on your network. Sysmon for Linux is part of Sysinternals.

The packages are available in the official Microsoft Linux repositories and instructions on how to install the packages for the different Linux distributions can be found in the Installation instructions.

This project contains the code for build and installing Sysmon on Linux.

For Ubuntu 20.04 and later:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
echo "deb https://download.mono-project.com/repo/ubuntu vs-bionic main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-official-vs.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install build-essential gcc g++ make cmake libelf-dev llvm clang libxml2 libxml2-dev libzstd1 git libgtest-dev apt-transport-https dirmngr monodevelop googletest google-mock libgmock-dev libjson-glib-dev

for Ubuntu 18.04:

sudo apt -y install build-essential gcc g++ make cmake libelf-dev llvm clang libxml2 libxml2-dev libzstd1 git libgtest-dev apt-transport-https dirmngr monodevelop googletest google-mock libjson-glib-dev
mkdir googletest-build
cd googletest-build
cmake /usr/src/googletest
make
sudo make install

The googletest-related libraries are built from source and installed under /usr/local:

• /usr/local/include/gtest
• /usr/local/include/gmock
• /usr/local/lib/libgtest*.a
• /usr/local/lib/libgmock*.a

Sysmon For Linux also depends on SysinternalsEBPF being installed: library libsysinternalsEBPF.so, header libsysinternalsEBPF.h, plus resource files in /opt/sysinternalsEBPF. These can be installed from the SysinternalsEBPF project or via the sysinternalsebpf DEB package from the packages.microsoft.com repository (see INSTALL.md).

cd
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/Sysinternals/SysmonForLinux.git
cd SysmonForLinux
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

./sysmonUnitTests

sudo ./sysmon -?

sudo ./sysmon -accepteula
sudo ./sysmon -i CONFIG_FILE

This will install sysmon and associated files into the /opt/sysmon directory. The binary is portable and self-contained - the build process packs the required files into the binary for installation with '-i'. Sysmon will restart on reboot with the same configuration.

Change the configuration with

sudo /opt/sysmon/sysmon -c CONFIG_FILE

Uninstall sysmon with

sudo /opt/sysmon/sysmon -u

Packages can be generated with:

make packages

The directories build/deb and build/rpm will be populated with the required files. If dpkg-deb is available, the build/deb directory will be used to create a deb package. Similarly if rpmbuild is available, the build/rpm directory will be used to create an rpm package.

Sysmon attempts to automatically discover the offsets of some members of some kernel structs. If this fails, please provide details of the kernel version (and config if possible) plus the error message to the GitHub issues page.

You can then generate a configuration file to override the autodiscovery by building the getOffsets module in the /opt/sysinternals/getOffsets directory. See the README.md in that directory for more information.

A man page for Sysmon can be found in the package directory, and is installed by both deb and rpm packages.

Use 'find' on the package directory to locate it manually.

sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog

or more human-readable

sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog | sudo /opt/sysmon/sysmonLogView

SysmonLogView has options to filter the output to make it easy to identify specific events or reduce outputted fields for brevity.

SysmonLogView is built when Sysmon is built and is installed into /opt/sysmon when sysmon is installed.

Important: You may wish to modify your Syslogger config to ensure it can handle particularly large events (e.g. >64KB, as defaults are often between 1KB and 8KB), and/or use the FieldSizes configuration entry to limit the length of output for some fields, such as CommandLine, Image, CurrentDirectory, etc.

Example:

Add <FieldSizes>CommandLine:100,Image:20</FieldSizes> under <Sysmon> in your configuration file.

See DEVELOP.md

Sysmon For Linux is licensed under MIT, with the eBPF programs licensed under GPL2. SysinternalsEBPF (on which Sysmon For Linux depends) is licensed under LGPL2.1, with the eBPF code library licensed under GPL2.