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Canary Alerts, Part 2 – Bonus Flavours

Publish Date thinkstcanary
Canaries and Canarytokens are tripwires that can alert you to intrusions. When alerts trigger, we want to make sure you get them where you need them. While our Slack integration is cool, you might prefer to send alerts through your SIEM. Or to a security automation tool. Maybe you want to leverage our API to integrate Canary alerts into a custom SOC tool. Want to turn a smart light bulb red and play the Imperial March? You could do that too.

Your way or the highway

We often puzzle at products that require customers to totally revamp how they do things. We never presume to be the most important tool in your toolbox, which is why our product is designed to be installed, configured, and (somewhat) forgotten, in minutes. We’d rather disappear into your existing workflow, only becoming visible again when you need us most.

Our customers dictate where and how they see our alerts. To enable this, we provide a wide variety of flexible options for sending and consuming alerts.

By default, you’ll get alerts on your console…

In your email…

…and as a text message.

And that’s not all…

For those of you wondering where the SIEM love is at, don’t worry. We can send syslog where you need it, as secure as you need it. A quick email to support@canary.tools with the details for your syslog endpoint will get the logs flowing in no time.

For Splunk fans, we have a Splunk app that works with both Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud. Details on installing and configuring the Splunk app can be found in our help documentation.

Email can also be an easy way to integrate Canary alerts with other tools. For example, most task and ticket management systems support creating tickets or tasks with an email. ServiceNow, BMC Remedy are common in large enterprises, but what about something simpler, with a free use plan? Something you could set up in minutes, like a Canary?

Build a SOC dashboard in 5 minutes, for free

We’re going to use Trello as an example of how flexible email can be for alert integration.

It turns out, Trello aligns well with the spirit of simple, fast and ‘just works’. Finding the custom email address that allows new card creation takes just a few clicks. Then, paste it in the email notifications list in your console settings and you’re good to go. Canary alerts will start showing up in Trello on the board and list you chose to attach the Trello email to.


A simple three-list configuration should work for basic alert triage: new alerts, acknowledged (being worked) and completed.


Any Canaries or Canarytokens triggered will result in a new card dropping into the New Alerts column immediately. Drag the card over to the Ack column and assign it to someone and Trello can notify them (based on your Trello configuration). Each card contains the full content of the alert and supports comments and attachments.

Once the investigation is complete, the card can be dragged over to the final column.

And, of course, an API

Anything you can do or view in the Canary console can be done via our fully documented API. It’s possible to control Canaries, create Canarytokens, view alerts, manage alerts and much more. Following is a simple bash script demonstrating how to grab a week’s worth of alerts and dump them into a spreadsheet-friendly format (CSV). Also available as a gist.

#!/bin/bash
# Create a CSV with the last week’s worth of alerts from your Canary console
# Requires curl and jq to be in the path

# Set this variable to your API token
export token=deadbeef12345678

# Customize this variable to match your console URL
export console=ab123456.canary.tools

# Date format (one week ago)
export dateformat=`date -v-1w “+%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S”`

# Filename date (right now)
export filedate=`date “+%Y%m%d%H%M%S”`

# Complete Filename
export filename=$filedate–$console-1week-alert-export.csv

# Base URL
export baseurl=“https://$console/api/v1/incidents/all?auth_token=$token&shrink=true&newer_than”

# Run the jewels
echo Datetime,Alert Description,Target,Target Port,Attacker,Attacker RevDNS > $filename
curl “$baseurl=$dateformat“ | jq -r ‘.incidents[] | [.description | .created_std, .description, .dst_host, .dst_port, .src_host, .src_host_reverse | tostring] | @csv’ >> $filename

Taking Flight

Like everything else Canary-related, alerts should be dead simple and easy to work with. Though alert volumes from Canaries are incredibly low (customers with dozens of Canaries report just a handful of alerts per year) we include a bunch of options to cover everything from common requests to esoteric requirements.

If you have any clever ideas on integrating alerts or consuming them, we’d love to hear them! Drop us a message on Twitter @ThinkstCanary or via email, support at canary dot tools.

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