Integrating real-time security monitoring with Bash

Security monitoring is essential for detecting and responding to threats in DevSecOps environments. While many commercial monitoring solutions exist, Bash scripting provides security specialists with the flexibility to create free custom monitoring systems tailored to their specific needs. By combining standard Linux tools with security-focused applications, you can build monitoring solutions that collect metrics, analyze logs, and alert you to suspicious activities.

Let’s build a monitoring system that watches our DevSecOps environment for security events. This script can be found in GitHub as ch16_sec_monitor.sh. Our script will monitor GitLab authentication logs for failed login attempts and send email alerts when a threshold is exceeded. Let’s examine the script, section by section.

First, here is the initial setup and configuration:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [[ $EUID -ne 0 ]]; then
    ...