Forensic Timeline of an IcedID Infection

The BackConnect and VNC parsers that were added to NetworkMiner 2.8.1 provide a unique possibility to trace the steps of an attacker with help of captured network traffic from a hacked computer.

In this blog post I use the free and open source version of NetworkMiner to see how GzipLoader downloads IcedID, after which the attacker deploys BackConnect VNC to purchase an iPhone 14 with a stolen credit card and then drops Cobalt Strike on the victim PC.

The analyzed pcap is 2022-10-31-IcedID-with-DarkVNC-and-Cobalt-Strike-full-pcap-raw.pcap from Brad Duncan's malware-traffic-analysis.net blog.

Safety First

I ran NetworkMiner in a Windows Sandbox when analyzing this PCAP file to avoid accidentally infecting my computer with any of the malicious artifacts that NetworkMiner extracts from the network traffic.

Another safe way to analyze Windows malware is to run NetworkMiner in Linux or macOS.

14:47 GzipLoader

This infection starts with GzipLoader (aka “IcedID Downloader”) reaching out to its C2 server on vgiragdoffy[.]com (67.205.184.237:80) to download IcedID.

The “_gat” cookie value in frame number 6 tells us that the victim machine is running a Windows 10 build 19045 (aka 22H2). The long “_u” value contains the victim’s username and hostname in hexadecimal representation and the “__io” value is the logged in user’s SID. NetworkMiner decodes these values from the GzipLoader request and displays them in the Hosts tab.

For more info about the GzipLoader cookie, see IcedID PhotoLoader evolution by Jason Reaves and the eSentire blog post on Gootloader and IcedID.

The response for this GzipLoader request is a 550 kB file (MD5 700c602086590b05dde8df57933c7e68) with a fake gzip header. This file actually contains the IcedID DLL (Odwikp.dll) and license.dat files.

14:47 IcedID

The banking trojan IcedID (aka BokBot) gets launched at 14:47:29 UTC (frame 641) after which it connects to these four IcedID servers used for payload delivery and C2:

• ringashopsu[.]com = 137.184.208.116
• sainforgromset[.]com = 138.68.255.102
• yeloypod[.]hair = 94.140.114.103
• airsaintol[.]beauty = 66.63.168.75

These four IcedID servers all run TLS servers with self signed certificates issued for "localhost" and doing TLS handshakes with JA3S hash ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc. Both these properties can be used as filters in NetworkMiner's Hosts tab to only display the IcedID C2 servers.

14:59 BackConnect and Keyhole VNC

Shortly after the IcedID C2 traffic has been started the IcedID bot also initiates BackConnect C2 connections to 137.74.104.108 on TCP port 8080 (frame 4505 at 14:59:14 UTC).

The BackConnect C2 server tells the bot to sleep for 60 seconds two times before launching a reverse VNC session with command 0x11 (frame 4530 at 15:01.09 UTC).

15:06 Apple Store

The keylog of the attacker above reveals that the attacker is typing “iphone 14 apple store buy”. The VNC graphics that NetworkMiner extracted from the PCAP file additionally reveal that this was a Google search query typed into an Edge browser.

15:10 Credit Card payment

The attacker proceeds to the Apple Store, puts a black iPhone 14 Plus for $987.99 into the shopping cart, enters a delivery address in West Hartford (US) and then inputs credit card details for the payment.

Luckily, the transaction was denied by Apple Store.

15:12 Reverse Shell

After having failed to buy an iPhone through the hacked computer the attacker instead deploys three reverse shell sessions using the BackConnect C2 channel.

These three commands are issued in the first reverse shell session:

In the second shell session the attacker first runs these three commands:

...and then starts a file manager session through the BackConnect C2 channel.

15:40 Deploy Cobalt Strike

The BackConnect file manager is used to upload a Cobalt Strike binary called P2.dll to "C:\ProgramData\" on the victim computer in frame 144535.

The uploaded P2.dll is then executed by running this command in the reverse shell session (frame 144707):

NetworkMiner extracts this uploaded DLL from the BackConnect network traffic.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the MD5 hash of P2.dll is cc69a31a067b62dda5f2076f8ee335e1. This file is flagged as malicious by most AV vendors (P2.dll on VT). However, none of them label it as Cobalt Strike. Luckily I was able to use Triage's malware config extractor to verify that this was indeed Cobalt Strike (P2.dll on tria.ge). Triage also revealed that the CobaltStrike C2 URL was
clouditsoft[.]com:8008/static-directory/mg.jpg

After the DLL gets executed the victim PC establishes Cobalt Strike beacon C2 connections to clouditsoft[.]com on port 8008 (frame 144715).

15:41 MOAR COBALT STRIKE

The BackConnect Reverse Shell log in NetworkMiner's Parameters tab shows that the attacker also attempted to download Cobalt Strike using PowerShell at 15:41:59 UTC (frame 145176) with this command:

IOC List

• IP:port 67.205.184.237:80 (GzipLoader)
• DNS vgiragdoffy[.]com (GzipLoader)
• MD5 700c602086590b05dde8df57933c7e68 (Fake gzip file)
• MD5 f57ab2e5e5720572d5eb19010ec8dcb4 (IcedID Odwikp.dll from fake gzip)
• MD5 57a9d9acb389bd74a7423a16ef81ac18 (IcedID license.dat from fake gzip)
• DNS ringashopsu[.]com (IcedID C2)
• DNS sainforgromset[.]com (IcedID C2)
• DNS yeloypod[.]hair (IcedID C2)
• DNS airsaintol[.]beauty (IcedID C2)
• IP:port 137.184.208.116:443 (IcedID C2)
• IP:port 138.68.255.102:443(IcedID C2)
• IP:port 94.140.114.103:443 (IcedID C2)
• IP:port 66.63.168.7:443 (IcedID C2)
• JA3S hash ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc (IcedID C2)
• IP:port 137.74.104.108:8080 (IcedID BackConnect C2)
• MD5 cc69a31a067b62dda5f2076f8ee335e1 (CobaltStrike P2.dll)
• DNS clouditsoft[.]com (CobaltStrike C2)
• IP:port 198.44.140.67:8008 (CobaltStrike C2)

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Thursday, 12 October 2023 13:23:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #IcedID​ #GzipLoader​ #BackConnect​ #VNC​ #CobaltStrike​ #Cobalt Strike​ #Windows Sandbox​ #ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc​ #JA3S​

NetworkMiner 2.8.1 Released

I am happy to announce the release of NetworkMiner 2.8.1 today!

This new release brings a VNC parser to NetworkMiner, so that screenshots, keystrokes and clipboard data can be extracted from unencrypted VNC traffic. NetworkMiner 2.8.1 additionally includes parsers for command-and-control (C2) protocols used by njRAT, IcedID, QakBot and Bazar. We have also added extraction of files sent using a HTTP PUT request, which is the rare cousin to the more common POST request. NetworkMiner’s Images tab has also been updated to enable filtering based on filename or pixel count.

VNC

NetworkMiner now supports the remote framebuffer (RFB) protocol (RFC 6143), which is the underlying protocol used in VNC software. VNC is used to remotely control another computer with help of a real-time video feed of the remote computer’s screen and the ability to control the remote desktop using a mouse and keyboard.

NetworkMiner reassembles the desktop graphics that get transferred between a VNC client and server to build a local representation of the remote desktop. Screenshots of that desktop then get extracted to disk by NetworkMiner as it gets updated. These desktop screenshots can be viewed in NetworkMiner’s Images tab. NetworkMiner also extracts keystrokes and clipboard data from the VNC traffic and displays them in the Parameters tab.

Limitations in VNC Extraction

Essential configuration of the VNC session is set up in the beginning of each TCP session. NetworkMiner therefore requires analyzed traffic to include this initial setup in order to successfully extract graphics from a VNC session.

Only traffic to TCP ports 5900 and 5901 will be parsed as VNC traffic by the free version of NetworkMiner. Our commercial tool NetworkMiner Professional has the ability to identify VNC traffic regardless of port number, but the free version will fail to extract screenshots from VNC traffic running on non-standard ports.

NetworkMiner’s VNC implementation is currently at an early stage, which is why it might fail to extract screenshots or other data from VNC sessions. If you encounter VNC traffic that NetworkMiner fails to parse, then we’d be very grateful if you would contact us and let us know so that we can improve NetworkMiner’s VNC extraction in future releases.

BackConnect

I have previously outlined the BackConnect protocol used by IcedID, QakBot as well as Bazar. This BackConnect protocol is used by botnet operators to remotely control a victim computer using a form of remote access trojan (RAT). This BackConnect protocol supports features such as tunneling network traffic through the victim’s computer, uploading files and the ability to control the victim’s computer using VNC.

NetworkMiner now has a parser for this BackConnect protocol, which allows analysts to see screenshots, keystrokes and file uploads from when the attacker interacts with the hacked computer. As you might have guessed, NetworkMiner’s VNC parser is reused in order to also parse reverse VNC traffic from BackConnect sessions.

I would like to thank Maxime Thiebaut for releasing his PCAPeek tool, which also reassembles reverse VNC traffic from BackConnect traffic. Maxime’s tool proved that it was possible to extract graphics from this C2 traffic, which motivated me to create a BackConnect VNC parser for NetworkMiner.

BackConnect VNC Replay

To demonstrate NetworkMiner’s reverse VNC reassembly I’d like to use the file “2023-07-26-IcedID-with-Keyhole-VNC-traffic.pcap” from Brad Duncan’s fantastic malware-traffic-analysis.net website. In this traffic the IcedID BackConnect C2 server listens to TCP port 443 on 165.232.175.216.

The screenshot thumbnails from the BackConnect VNC traffic shows that the attacker opens up the Amazon website on the victim’s computer. A copy of the full 1920x1152 screenshot, which NetworkMiner extracted from the VNC traffic, can be viewed here: VNC_73F81C83_230726142247.jpg

The parameters tab in NetworkMiner additionally confirms that the attacker manually typed “amazon.com” into the hacked computer’s web browser.

Limitations in BackConnect Parser

The BackConnect implementation in NetworkMiner 2.8.1 is pretty well tested and even supports the new “encrypted” version of BackConnect that IcedID has been deploying lately (we call it “BackConnect XOR”). NetworkMiner can parse the BackConnect C2 traffic as well as the traffic from modules for reverse VNC, reverse SOCKS, reverse shell and the file manager.

Unfortunately the BackConnect traffic typically runs on TCP ports like 443 or 8080, which are normally used for TLS or web proxies. The free open source version of NetworkMiner normally attempts to interpret traffic to port 443 as TLS and 8080 as HTTP proxy, even though it might be BackConnect. A hardcoded list of 32 verified BackConnect C2 servers, such as 165.232.175.216:443, 137.184.172.23:443 and 185.99.132.16:8080, has therefore been added to NetworkMiner’s source code. This enables NetworkMiner to interpret traffic to those IP:port combinations as BackConnect. Our commercial tool NetworkMiner Professional can identify protocols without relying on the port number though, this enables the “Pro” version to also parse BackConnect traffic to C2 servers that aren’t among the 32 hard coded ones in the source code.

njRAT

njRAT is an old, yet still very popular remote access trojan (RAT). It has been around for at least 10 years (since 2013) and can be used to do things like:

• Steal credentials
• Take screenshots of the desktop
• Start the camera
• Record audio with the microphone
• Start a reverse shell
• Upload or download files
• Execute a file or module
• Capture keystrokes with a keylogger
• Create, read or delete registry keys
• Run a command

I have been teaching students in my network forensics classes how to manually parse njRAT traffic since 2015, but from now on I’ll instead be able to tell them to load the njRAT traffic into NetworkMiner to see what the attacker did on the victim’s computer.

The NetworkMiner parameters and victim PC screenshot above were extracted from 2015-04-22_capture-win4.pcap in StratosphereIPS’ dataset CTU-Malware-Capture-Botnet-120-1. The victim PC desktop screenshot actually came out as a 51x4900 pixel image in NetworkMiner 2.8.1, so I had to manually reorganize the tiles to a 510x490 image instead. I’m planning to add an automatic retiling feature to NetworkMiner to avoid having to do this manually in the future.

Limitations in njRAT Parser

njRAT comes in many different versions, forks and flavors and the protocol even has a field delimiter sequence that can be customized for each njRAT backdoor. I can therefore not guarantee that NetworkMiner will be able to parse traffic from all njRAT sessions, but so far I’ve seen very good results – even when custom field delimiters are being used.

Nevertheless, this trojan has an abundance of features but only the most commonly used ones are implemented in NetworkMiner. More specifically NetworkMiner primarily supports extraction of screenshots, credentials, keylog data, file uploads and downloads. NetworkMiner also extracts exfiltrated metadata about the victim machine and bot, such as the hostname, operating system, logged in user, bot ID, botnet, njRAT version and njRAT install date.

Also, as previously mentioned, NetworkMiner doesn’t yet stitch together tiles of desktop screenshots correctly.

Another limitation is that an njRAT C2 server can be deployed on any TCP port, which might prevent the free version from interpreting the C2 traffic as njRAT. The free version of NetworkMiner currently tries to parse traffic to ports like 1177, 5050, 5552 and a few others as njRAT, while NetworkMiner Professional will automatically recognize the njRAT protocol regardless which port it runs on.

Bug Fixes

We’ve added support for SIP keepalive messages (RFC 5626) in NetworkMiner 2.8.1. NetworkMiner Professional would previously fail to extract VoIP calls, or text messages sent through SIP, if a keepalive packet was sent in the session prior to the call or text message. We have also fixed a bug in NetworkMiner’s CapWap parser.

Upgrading to Version 2.8.1

Users who have purchased NetworkMiner Professional can download a free update to version 2.8.1 from our customer portal, or use the “Check for Updates” feature from NetworkMiner's Help menu. Those who instead prefer to use the free and open source version can grab the latest version of NetworkMiner from the official NetworkMiner page.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Monday, 02 October 2023 11:13:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #VNC​ #BackConnect​ #IcedID​ #njRAT​

EvilExtractor Network Forensics

I analyzed a PCAP file from a sandbox execution of the Evil Extractor stealer malware earlier today. This stealer collects credentials and files of interest from the victim’s computer and exfiltrates them to an FTP server. It is designed to autonomously collect and exfiltrate data rather than receiving commands from an operator through a command-and-control channel. The EvilExtractor creators market this feature as a “golden bullet”.

Real hackers don’t use reverse shells right? If you have only one bullet, would you waste with reverse shell? Try Evil Extractor to have golden bullet.

I downloaded the Evil Extractor capture file from Triage to a Windows Sandbox environment, to avoid accidentally infecting my computer when extracting artifacts from the PCAP. I then opened it up in the free version of NetworkMiner.

NetworkMiner shows that after checking its public IP on ipinfo.io EvilExtractor makes an unencrypted HTTP connection to a web server on 193.42.33.232 to download KK2023.zip. This zip archive contains a file called “Lst.exe” which is used to steal browser data, cookies and credentials according to Fortinet.

Twenty seconds later an FTP connection is established to 89.116.53.55 on TCP port 21. The username and password used to authenticate to the FTP server was “u999382941” and “Test1234”.

On the FTP server EvilExtractor creates a directory named after the country and hostname of the victim's PC, such as “(Sweden)DESKTOP-VV03LJ”, in which it creates the following three sub directories:

• 1-Password-Cookies
• 2-Credentials
• 3-Files

After uploading browser cookies, browser history and cached passwords from Chrome, Firefox and Edge to the “1-Password-Cookies” directory EvilExtractor sends a file called “Credentials.txt” to the “2-Credentials” directory. The contents of this text file looks something like this:

Public IP: [redacted]
Location: [lat],[long]
Computer Name: [redacted]
Username: Admin
RAM: 4 GB
OS Name: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
OS Bit: 64-bit
Keyboard Language: en-US
GPU: [redacted]
CPU: Intel [redacted]
MAC Address: [redacted]
Extracted WIFI: [redacted]

The stealer also exfiltrates files with mpeg, docx, jpeg, pptx, zip, avi and rar extensions from the victim PC to the “3-Files” directory on the FTP server. The directory structure of the victim’s PC is maintained on the FTP server, so that files from the victim's desktop end up in a folder called “Desktop” on the FTP server.

The stealer later downloaded a keylogger module (Confirm.zip) and a webcam module (MnMs.zip), but no additional data was exfiltrated from this particular victim PC after that point.

IOC List

• Web server: 193.42.33.232:80
• FTP server: 89.116.53.55:21
• EvilExtractor: 9650ac3a9de8d51fddab092c7956bdae
• KK2023.zip: f07b919ff71fb33ee0f77e9e02c5445b
• Lst.exe: 163d4e2d75f8ce6c838bab888bf9629c
• Confirm.zip: 30532a6121cb33afc04eea2b8dcea461
• Confirm.exe: 0c18c4669e7ca7e4d21974ddcd24fdca
• MnMs.zip: bda0bda512d3e2a81fc9e4cf393091eb
• MnMs.exe: fb970c4367609860c2e5b17737a9f460

Users with an account on Triage can download the analyzed PCAP file from here: https://tria.ge/230424-vv9wvsfb2v/behavioral2

Update 2023-04-27

Jane tweeted a link to an execution of this same sample on ANY.RUN. This execution showed very similar results as the one on Triage, but with an interesting twist. Not only did the ANY.RUN execution exfiltrate images and documents from the Desktop and Downloads folders, it also exfiltrated “vv9wvsfb2v_pw_infected.zip”, which contained the EvilExtractor EXE file that was being run!

The PCAP from the ANY.RUN execution can be downloaded from here: https://app.any.run/tasks/43a11a79-4d1f-406c-86d7-158efb5ede01/

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Wednesday, 26 April 2023 08:50:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #FTP​ #NetworkMiner​ #Sandbox​ #Triage​ #ANY.RUN​

QakBot C2 Traffic

In this video I analyze network traffic from a QakBot (QBot) infection in order to identify the Command-and-Control (C2) traffic. The analyzed PCAP file is from malware-traffic-analysis.net.

IOC List

• C2 IP and port: 80.47.61.240:2222
• C2 IP and port: 185.80.53.210:443
• QakBot proxy IP and port: 23.111.114.52:65400
• JA3: 72a589da586844d7f0818ce684948eea
• JA3S: ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc
• JA3S: fd4bc6cea4877646ccd62f0792ec0b62
• meieou.info X.509 cert hash: 9de2a1c39fbe1952221c4b78b8d21dc3afe53a3e
• meieou.info X.509 cert Subject OU: Hoahud Duhcuv Dampvafrog
• meieou.info X.509 cert Issuer O: Qdf Wah Uotvzke LLC.
• gifts.com X.509 cert hash: 0c7a37f55a0b0961c96412562dd0cf0b0b867d37
• HTML Body Hash: 22e5446e82b3e46da34b5ebce6de5751664fb867
• HTML Title: Welcome to CentOS

Links

• QakBot PCAP download (malware-traffic-analysis.net)
• 80.47.61.240 (VirusTotal)
• 80.47.61.240:2222 (ThreatFox)
• 80.47.61.240 (Feodo Tracker)
• 80.47.61.240 (Censys)
• 185.80.53.210 (Censys)

For more analysis of QakBot network traffic, check out my Hunting for C2 Traffic video.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Thursday, 02 March 2023 12:43:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #QakBot​ #QBot​ #C2​ #Video​ #malware-traffic-analysis.net​ #ThreatFox​ #ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc​ #fd4bc6cea4877646ccd62f0792ec0b62​ #CapLoader​ #NetworkMiner​

IEC-104 File Transfer Extraction

Did you know that the SCADA protocol IEC 60870-5-104 (IEC-104) can be used to transfer files? This file transfer feature is primarily used for retrieving disturbance data from electric grid protection devices, such as protective relays, but can in practice be used to transfer any type of data.

In this video I demonstrate how IEC-104 file transfers can be extracted from network traffic with NetworkMiner.

The network traffic that was captured with NetworkMiner in this video can be downloaded here: NM_2022-12-13T14-16-00.pcap

The IEC-104 software used in the video was the IEC 104 RTU Server Simulator and IEC 104 Client Simulator from FreyrSCADA.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Monday, 09 January 2023 09:00:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #IEC-104​ #SCADA​ #NetworkMiner​ #ICS​ #PCAP​

NetworkMiner 2.8 Released

I am happy to announce the release of NetworkMiner 2.8 today! This new version comes with an improved user interface, better parsing of IEC-104 traffic and decapsulation of CAPWAP traffic. The professional edition of NetworkMiner additionally adds port-independent detection of SMTP and SOCKS traffic, which enables extraction of emails and tunneled traffic even when non-standard ports are used.

User Interface Improvements

The first thing you see when starting NetworkMiner is the Hosts tab, which now has been updated to include a filter text box. This text box can be used to filter the displayed hosts based on the property fields they contain. By entering “Android” into the filter box NetworkMiner will show only the hosts having a property containing the string “Android”, for example in the OS classification or User-Agent string. Other properties you might find useful to filter on are hostname, JA3 hash and MAC address. If you’re running NetworkMiner Professional then you’ll also be able to filter on Country thanks to the MaxMind GeoLite2 feature included in the Pro edition.

It’s now also possible to copy text from most tabs in NetworkMiner with Ctrl+C or by right-clicking and selecting “Copy selected rows”. A maximum of 10 rows can be copied at a time using the free version of NetworkMiner, while the Professional version allows all rows to be copied in one go.

The content based file type identification introduced in NetworkMiner 2.7 has been improved to also differentiate between EXE and DLL files as of version 2.8.

• Matanbuchus malware DLL disguised as PNG
• MD5: d733d96a25fd14f4494f6d76f9ff9892
• Source: 2022-06-17-Matanbuchus-with-Cobalt-Strike.pcap

• AutoIt EXE disguised as ZIP file
• MD5: c56b5f0201a3b3de53e561fe76912bfd
• Source: 2022-08-19-Astaroth-Guildma-infection-traffic.pcap

IEC 60870-5-104

NetworkMiner’s parser for the SCADA protocol IEC 60870-5-104 (IEC-104) has been significantly improved in version 2.8. NetworkMiner now supports more IEC-104 commands and the commands are presented on the Parameters tab in a clearer way than before.

Image: IEC-104 commands sent by the Industroyer2 malware

I’m also proud to announce that NetworkMiner 2.8 now extracts files transferred over the IEC-104 protocol. More details about that particular feature is available in our IEC-104 File Transfer Extraction blog post.

CAPWAP Decapsulation

NetworkMiner 2.8 can read IEEE 802.11 packets inside CAPWAP tunnels between WLAN Controllers and Access Points. This feature allows WiFi traffic to be analyzed without having to capture packets in the air.

Reading PCAP from a Named Pipe

NetworkMiner previously allowed packets to be read from PacketCache over a named pipe. This feature has been upgraded to allow a PCAP stream to be read from any named pipe, not just from PacketCache. Here’s an example showing how to capture packets from localhost for 10 seconds with RawCap and make those packets available via a named pipe called “RawCap”:

RawCap will start capturing packets once a PCAP reader connects to the “RawCap” named pipe, which now can be done with NetworkMiner by clicking “Read from Named Pipe” on the File menu.

Bug Fixes

NetworkMiner previously produced incorrect JA3S signatures for TLS servers if they sent Session ID values in Server Hello messages or listed only one supported TLS version using the Supported Versions extension. These bugs have now been fixed in NetworkMiner 2.8.

NetworkMiner’s live sniffing feature has been improved to better handle huge packets caused by Large Send Offload (LSO). NetworkMiner previously crashed with an error message saying that the received packet was “larger than the internal message buffer” when attempting to capture a too large packet.

TCP sessions occasionally didn’t show up in NetworkMiner’s Sessions tab previously if the application layer protocol was unknown. This bug has now been fixed in version 2.8.

New Features in NetworkMiner Professional

NetworkMiner Professional includes a feature for port independent protocol detection of protocols like FTP, HTTP, IRC, Meterpreter, SSH and TLS, which enables extraction of artifacts from those protocols even though the service is running on a non-standard port. This new release adds two additional protocols to the collection of identified protocols, namely SMTP and SOCKS. This allows analysts to extract emails from spam runs sent to ports other than 25 or 587, as well as to see what goes on inside covert SOCKS tunnels running on non-standard ports.

Image: SMTP credentials extracted from spam run to non-standard SMTP port

In addition to allowing hosts to be filtered using string and regex matching, NetworkMiner Professional also allows the discovered hosts to be filtered on IP address using CIDR notation, such as “192.168.1.0/24” or “10.0.0.0/8”.

Image: NetworkMiner Professional with CIDR filter 192.168.88.0/24

Here are some IPv4 and IPv6 CIDR filters that you might find useful:

• 224.0.0.0/4 = IPv4 multicast (224/4 is also supported)
• 127.0.0.0/8 = IPv4 loopback (127/8 is also supported)
• fe80::/10 = IPv6 link-local addresses
• ff00::/8 = IPv6 multicast
• 0.0.0.0/0 = IPv4 hosts (0/0 is also supported)
• 0::/0 = IPv6 hosts

Credits

We’d like to thank René Perraux, Matt Smith and Anand Kumar Singh for reporting bugs that have been fixed in this new release.

Upgrading to Version 2.8

Users who have purchased NetworkMiner Professional can download a free update to version 2.8 from our customer portal, or use the “Check for Updates” feature from NetworkMiner's Help menu. Those who instead prefer to use the free and open source version can grab the latest version of NetworkMiner from the official NetworkMiner page.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Monday, 02 January 2023 08:00:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #IEC-104​ #SMTP​ #SOCKS​ #PIPI​ #CIDR​

NetworkMiner in FLARE VM

NetworkMiner is now available as a package in the reverse engineering platform FLARE VM. You can either select the networkminer.vm package in the installer or install NetworkMiner later on from the command line.

NetworkMiner can be installed in FLARE VM from an admin shell by running

After installation you’ll find NetworkMiner in the “Networking” category together with FakeNet-NG and Wireshark.

FLARE VM allows NetworkMiner to be launched by running the command “networkminer”, optionally with a PCAP file as an argument.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Monday, 12 December 2022 10:50:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​

Hunting for C2 Traffic

In this video I look for C2 traffic by doing something I call Rinse-Repeat Threat Hunting, which is a method for removing "normal" traffic in order to look closer at what isn't normal.

The video was recorded in a Windows Sandbox in order to avoid accidentally infecting my Windows PC with malware.

The PCAP files analyzed in the video are:

• 2022-06-27-part-1-of-2-Qakbot-with-Cobalt-Strike-and-DarkVNC.pcap
• 2022-06-27-part-2-of-2-Qakbot-with-DarkVNC-and-email-banner-traffic.pcap
• 2022-06-28-TA578-IcedID-with-Cobalt-Strike-raw.pcap

Thank you for sharing these capture files Brad!

IOC List

• QBot source: 23.29.125.210
• QBot md5: 2b55988c0d236edd5ea1a631ccd37b76
• QBot sha1: 033a22c3bb2b0dd1677973e1ae6280e5466e771c
• QBot sha256: 2d68755335776e3de28fcd1757b7dcc07688b31c37205ce2324d92c2f419c6f0
• Qbot proxy protocol server: 23.111.114.52:65400
• QBot C2: 45.46.53.140:2222
• QBot C2 JA3: 51c64c77e60f3980eea90869b68c58a8
• QBot C2 JA3S : 7c02dbae662670040c7af9bd15fb7e2f
• QBot X.509 domain: thdoot.info
• QBot X.509 thumbprint: 5a8ee4be30bd5da709385940a1a6e386e66c20b6
• IcedID BackConnect server: 78.31.67.7:443
• IcedID BackConnect server: 91.238.50.80:8080

References and Links

• herALook.dat (MalwareBazaar)
• herALook.dat (VirusTotal)
• Qbot proxy protocol details (Securelist)
• QBot JA3 hash (DFIR Report)
• IcedID BackConnect protocol (Group-IB)

Update 2022-10-13

Part two of this analysis has been published: IcedID BackConnect Protocol

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Friday, 30 September 2022 12:37:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #Threat Hunting​ #PCAP​ #CapLoader​ #NetworkMiner​ #NetworkMiner Professional​ #Video​ #QBot​ #QakBot​ #51c64c77e60f3980eea90869b68c58a8​ #IcedID​ #TA578​