NetworkMiner 2.6 Released

We are happy to announce the release of NetworkMiner 2.6 today! The network forensic tool is now even better at extracting emails, password hashes, FTP transfers and artifacts from HTTP and HTTP/2 traffic than before.

Some of the major improvements in this new release are related to extraction and presentation of emails from SMTP, POP3 and IMAP traffic. On that note, we’d like to thank Mandy van Oosterhout for reporting a bug in our email parser!

I have previously blogged about how to extract John-the-Ripper hashes from Kerberos network traffic with NetworkMiner. We have now added support for presenting LANMAN and NTLM credentials as JtR hashes as well.

We have also improved NetworkMiner’s Linux support. Files, images and folders can now be opened in external tools directly from the NetworkMiner GUI also when running NetworkMiner in Linux using Mono 6 (or later). Linux users previously got a “System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception” error message saying something like “Cannot find the specified file” or “Access denied” due to a breaking change introduced in Mono version 6.

The new release also comes with several updates of how HTTP and HTTP/2 traffic is handled and presented. We have, for example, added better extraction of data sent in HTTP (or HTTP/2) POST requests. Posted JSON formatted parameters are also extracted even if the JSON data has been gzip compressed. The “Accept-Language” header values in HTTP and HTTP/2 are extracted as “Host Details” in order to support forensic analysis of user language settings, as shown by Fox-IT in their “Operation Wocao - Shining a light on one of China’s hidden hacking groups” report.

NetworkMiner has supported decapsulation of tunneling protocols and protocols for network virtualization, like 802.1Q, GRE, PPPoE, VXLAN, OpenFlow, MPLS and EoMPLS, since version 2.1. We have now improved our GRE parser to also support NVGRE (RFC 7637) by adding support for Transparent Ethernet Bridging.

Jan Hesse sent us a feature request on Twitter earlier this year, where asked about support for FritzBox captures. We are happy to announce that NetworkMiner now supports the modified pcap format you get when sniffing network traffic with a FritzBox gateway.

NetworkMiner 2.6 can now also parse and extract SIP chat messages (RFC 3428) to the “Messages” tab. Audio extraction of VoIP calls is still a feature that is exclusively available only in NetworkMiner Professional though.

NetworkMiner Professional

Our commercial tool NetworkMiner Professional has received a few additional updates, such as support for analysis of HTTP/2 traffic in the “Browsers tab”. However, please note that NetworkMiner does not perform TLS decryption, so the HTTP/2 traffic will have to be decrypted by a TLS proxy like PolarProxy prior to being saved to a PCAP file.

We have added a few new great online services to NetworkMiner Pro’s OSINT lookup as well, such as shouldiclick.org, Browserling, MalwareDomainList and VirusTotal lookups of URL’s in the “Browsers” tab. We have also added some additional external OSINT sources for lookups of IP addresses and domain names, such as MalwareDomainList and mnemonic ACT. The JA3 hash lookup menu in NetworkMiner Professional’s “Hosts” tab has also been extended to include GreyNoise.

NetworkMiner Pro previously played back G.722 VoIP audio at half speed. This issue has now been fixed, so that G.722 RTP audio is extracted and played back in 16k samples/s. The bug was due to an error in RFC 1890 that was later corrected in RFC 3551. Thanks to Michael "MiKa" Kafka for teaching us about this!

Excerpt from RFC 3551:

Even though the actual sampling rate for G.722 audio is 16,000 Hz, the RTP clock rate for the G722 payload format is 8,000 Hz because that value was erroneously assigned in RFC 1890 and must remain unchanged for backward compatibility. The octet rate or sample-pair rate is 8,000 Hz.

We’d also like to mention that NetworkMiner Professional now comes with improved analytical support to help investigators detect Tor traffic.

Upgrading to Version 2.6

Users who have purchased a license for NetworkMiner Professional 2.x can download a free update to version 2.6 from our customer portal, or use the “Help > Check for Updates” feature. 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 Wednesday, 23 September 2020 09:10:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #SMTP​ #POP3​ #IMAP​ #email​ #FTP​ #JtR​ #John​ #Mono​ #Linux​ #HTTP​ #HTTP/2​ #GRE​ #SIP​ #VoIP​ #Tor​ #PCAP​

NetworkMiner 2.3.2 Released!

NetworkMiner 2.3.2 was released this morning, and there was much rejoicing!

This new release primarily fixes bugs related to extraction of emails and VoIP calls. We have also corrected a bug affecting the json/CASE export function in NetworkMiner Professional.

The OSINT domain name lookup in NetworkMiner Professional has also been extended with the crt.sh Certificate Search and DNSTrails has been replaced with SecurityTrails.

Credits

We’d like to thank Carlos Kasprzykowski for notifying us about the VoIP bug, which caused lots of files to be written to the %TEMP% directory when there were more than 50 simultaneous SIP+RTP calls. We also wanna thank Josh Wilczek for reporting a bug in the “User Defined Port-to-Protocol Mappings” in NetworkMiner Professional’s Settings window, which also has been fixed in the 2.3.2 release.

Upgrading to Version 2.3.2

Users who have purchased a license for NetworkMiner Professional 2.x can download a free update to version 2.3.2 from our customer portal. Those who instead prefer to use the free and open source version can grab the latest version of NetworkMiner from the official NetworkMiner page.

⛏ FOR GREAT JUSTICE! ⛏

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Monday, 27 August 2018 09:23:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #Netresec​ #NetworkMiner​ #RTP​ #VoIP​ #SIP​ #email​ #CASE​

NetworkMiner 2.0 Released

I'm proud to announce the release of NetworkMiner 2.0 today! There are several longed-for features that are part of this major release, such as:

• SMB/CIFS parser now supports file extraction from SMB write operations.
• Added parser for SMB2 protocol (read and write).
• Additional IEC-104 commands implemented.
• Added Modbus/TCP parser (as requested by attendees at 4SICS 2014).
• Improved SMTP parser.
• Improved FTP parser.
• Improved DNS parser.
• GUI flickering is heavily reduced when loading PCAP files or doing live sniffing.
• Extraction of web server favicon images (shown in Hosts tab).
• Added "Keyword filter" to several tabs (see more details below).

For those not familiar with NetworkMiner, here's a short summary:

NetworkMiner is a Network Forensic Analysis Tool (NFAT) for Windows (but also works in Linux / Mac OS X / FreeBSD). NetworkMiner can be used as a passive network sniffer/packet capturing tool in order to detect operating systems, sessions, hostnames, open ports etc. without putting any traffic on the network. NetworkMiner can also parse PCAP files for off-line analysis and to regenerate/reassemble transmitted files and certificates from PCAP files.

NetworkMiner has, since the first release in 2007, become a popular tool among incident response teams as well as law enforcement. NetworkMiner is today used by companies and organizations all over the world.

Keyword Filtering

Users of NetworkMiner sometimes run into a needle-in-the-haystack problem when trying to find some specific entry in the Files, Parameters or DNS tab. The technique most analysts have been using so far is to sort the data based a column of interest (by clicking the column header) and then scroll down to the row they are looking for. This method isn't optimal, which is why several users have requested support for keyword filtering. I've personally received several of these requests when teaching my Networks Forensics class.

I'm therefore happy to say that version 2.0 of NetworkMiner has a built-in filtering capability for the data displayed in the following tabs:

• Files
• Parameters
• DNS
• Messages
• Sessions

Image: Parameters tab with filter “user-agent” (case insensitive)

The filter allows rows to be filtered based on one or several keywords. The entered keywords are matched against all text in all columns of the tab. A drop-down menu in the filter bar allows the analyst to chose “Exact Phrase”, “All Words” or “Any Word” as search criteria for the entered keywords.

More Data in the Parameters Tab

We have previously held back on what data we add to the Parameters tab. However, now with the filtering feature in place, we decided to add a lot more information to the Parameters list. Some of the new parameter types available in version 2.0 are:

• HTTP request methods
• HTTP URI's
• HTTP response status codes
• HTTP headers
• SMB Tree Connect AndX Request (attempts to connect to a named file share)
• SMB NT Create AndX Request (mapping of filename to file handle ID)
• SMB2 Connect Requests (attempts to connect to a named file share)
• SMB2 File ID (mapping of filename to file handle ID)
• SMB2 file timestamps (Created, Modified and Accessed).

Image: SMB2 file timestamps shown in Parameters tab

A Warning to Malware Analysts

NetworkMiner has previously appended the “.octet-stream” or “x-msdos-program” extension to all binary files being downloaded over HTTP (since those are the MIME types used for Windows executables). As of version 2.0, however, files named {something}.exe will not be renamed this way. This means that there is now a risk of accidental execution of such files, for example if the user right-clicks an .exe file in NetworkMiner and selects “Open File”.

If you analyze PCAP files that might contain malware, then our recommendation is to perform the analysis on some other operating system than Windows. NetworkMiner runs fine on Linux as well as Mac OS X.

NetworkMiner Professional

On top of the updates provided in the free version of NetworkMiner we have added a few additional useful features to NetworkMiner Professional.

The new features in the Pro version include:

• Advanced OS fingerprinting. Identifies a great range of operating systems and device types (including Apple iOS, Android and many others) based on DHCP traffic.
• Web Browsing Analysis. A new GUI tab called "Browsers" has been added, which shows what URLs each unique browser has visited. More details on this feature will be released shortly in a separate blog post.
• User Settings. Settings in GUI can now be saved to make them persistent between executions.
• Better Export Logs. The CSV format used for exporting data has been improved, we have also added support for XML formatted data export.

Defang Executables

Remember the warning about .exe files downloaded over HTTP no longer get the “.octet-stream” extension? To counter the risk of accidental execution of malware we've added a defang feature to NetworkMiner Professional. When enabled, this feature will rename files like “malware.exe” to “malware.exe_” in order to prevent execution. It is not only .exe files being renamed. At the moment the following file extensions are defanged by appending “_” to the extension:

exe, bat, msi, vb, vbe, vbs, pif, com, scr, jar, cmd, js, jse, ps1 and psc1

The defang feature renames files regardless if they were transmitted over HTTP, FTP, TFTP, SMB, SMB2, SMTP or any other protocol supported by NetworkMiner.

Please note that the defang feature is turned off by default. So if you wanna protect yourself from accidental execution, make sure to enable this feature in the NetworkMiner Settings (available under Tools > Settings).

Upgrade Path for Professional Users

We always provide free minor version upgrades of our software. However, please note that version 2.0 is a major version release, which require a new license to be purchased. Customers with a license for NetworkMiner Professional 1.x can get a 20% discount when purchasing version 2.0 by entering their current license number into the “Additional Information” field of the NetworkMiner Professional order form.

Credits

There are many people who have provided feedback and ideas for improvements that are now part of NetworkMiner 2.0. I would especially like to thank Eric Kollmann (author of Satori) for his impressive ability to find bugs in beta releases. I would also like to thank Ulf Skoglund, Dmitry Shchemelev, @xredumb, Sabin and Andrew Brant for their feedback on improvements in DNS, TCP, HTTP and SMTP parsing. Finally, I wanna give a shout-out to Steffen Thorkildsen for spawning the idea for a browser tracking feature.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Tuesday, 09 February 2016 11:38:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #SMB​ #SMB2​ #Modbus​ #filter​ #favicon​ #SMTP​ #email​

NetworkMiner 1.6 Released

We've released version 1.6 of NetworkMiner today!

The new features in NetworkMiner 1.6 include:

• Drag-and-Drop
  Reassembled files and images can be opened with external tools by drag-and-dropping items from NetworkMiner's Files or Images tabs onto your favorite editor or viewer.


• Email extraction
  Improved extraction of emails and attachments sent over SMTP.


• DNS analysis
  Failed DNS lookups that result in NXDOMAIN and SERVFAIL are displayed in the DNS tab along with the flags in the DNS response.


• Live sniffing
  Improved live sniffing performance.


• PCAP-over-IP
  Remote live sniffing enabled by bringing the PCAP-over-IP feature into the free open source version of NetworkMiner.

Identifying Malware DNS lookups

DNS traffic from the Kuluoz-Asprox botnet (PCAP file available via Contagio)

Note the NXDOMAIN responses and “No” in Alexa top 1 million column in the screenshot above; these domains are probably generated by a domain generation algorithm (DGA).

Live Sniffing with Pcap-over-IP

The PCAP-over-IP functionality enables live sniffing also on non-Windows machines, simply by running tcpdump (or dumpcap) and netcat like this:

# tcpdump -i eth0 -s0 -U -w - | nc localhost 57012

To receive the Pcap-over-IP stream in NetworkMiner, simply press Ctrl+R and select a TCP port.

For more information about this feature please see our previous blog post about the PCAP‑over‑IP feature.

NetworkMiner Professional

The professional version of NetworkMiner additionally contains the following improvements of the command line tool NetworkMinerCLI:

• Enabled reading of PCAP and PcapNG data from standard input (STDIN)
• Full support for PCAP-over-IP
• More detailed DNS logging in NetworkMinerCLI's CSV export of DNS responses

The ability to read PCAP data from STDIN with NetworkMinerCLI makes it really simple to do live extraction of emails and email attachments. Here's an example showing how to do live SMTP extraction in Linux:

# tcpdump -i eth0 -s0 -w - port 25 or 587 | mono NetworkMinerCLI.exe -r - -w /var/log/smtp_extraction/

The syntax for extracting emails and attachments in Windows is very similar:

C:\>dumpcap.exe -i 1 -f "port 25 or 587" -w - | NetworkMinerCLI.exe -r -

The TCP ports 25 and 587, which are used in the capture filter above, are the standard port numbers for SMTP. In order to do live extraction of files sent over HTTP, simply use “port 80” as capture filter instead. Likewise, X.509 certificates can also be extracted from HTTPS sessions simply by using “port 443” as capture filter.

Download NetworkMiner 1.6

The most recent release of the free (open source) version of NetworkMiner can be downloaded from SourceForge or our NetworkMiner product page. Paying customers can download an update for NetworkMiner Professional from our customer portal.

Credits

We would like to thank Dan Eriksson (FM CERT) and Lenny Hansson (Danish GovCERT) for submitting bug reports and feature requests.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Monday, 16 June 2014 11:00:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #Netresec​ #NetworkMiner​ #Professional​ #SMTP​ #Extract​ #DNS​ #PCAP-over-IP​