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​

BPF is your Friend

CapLoader comes with support for Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF), which makes it possible to filter network traffic based on IP addresses, protocols and port numbers without using external tools. Being able to filter captured network traffic is crucial when analyzing large sets of PCAP files as well as in order to hunt down compromised hosts with Rinse Repeat Intrusion Detection.

There are two ways to apply filters with BPF in CapLoader; you can either apply an input filter before loading your PCAPs, or you can apply a display filter after the capture files have been loaded.

Input Filter

The fastest way to filter a large set of PCAP files with CapLoader is to enter an Input Filter before loading the capture files. Having an input filter will speed up the loading time significantly, since CapLoader will not need to analyze packets and flows that don't match the BPF syntax. The downside is that you will need to know beforehand what filter you want to use. In order to apply a changed input filter you need to reload the loaded PCAP files (pressing F5 will do this for you).

Display Filter

CapLoader supports display filters in order to allow filters to be changed on the fly, without having to reload the PCAP files. As the name implies, display filters affect what flows/services/hosts that are displayed in CapLoader. A changed display filter does not require the dataset to be reloaded, but it does require the GUI to update the visible flows. This GUI update will be somewhat slower compared to when setting an input filter.

BPF Syntax

CapLoader's BPF implementation does not support the full BPF syntax. In fact, only the most central primitives are implemented, which are:

More complex filter expressions can be built up by using the words and, or, not and parentheses to combine primitives. Here are some examples:

• host 8.8.8.8 and udp port 53
• net 199.16.156.0/22 and port 80
• (port 80 or port 443) and not host 192.168.0.1

For all boolean algebra geeks out there we can confirm that our BPF implementation gives and precedence over or, which means that the last example above would give a different result if the parentheses were removed.

Keeping it Short

Steve McCanne gave a keynote presentation at SharkFest 2011, where he talked about how he created BPF. Steve's work was guided by Van Jacobson, who challenged him to make the BPF syntax human friendly rather than requiring the user to type a clunky filtering syntax. We've adopted this thinking and therefore allow filters like these:

• 10.1.1.3
  Flows to or from IP address 10.1.1.3. Translates to “ip host 10.1.1.3”


• 128.3/16
  Flows to or from the 128.3.0.0/16 network. Translates to “ip net 128.3.0.0/16”


• port 53
  Flows to or from TCP, UDP or SCTP port 53.

Try it for Free!

We've made the BPF implementation available even in the free version of CapLoader. You don't need to register to get the free version; just download, extract and run. The tool is portable, so you won't even have to install it. Visit https://www.netresec.com/?page=CapLoader to grab a copy and start filtering!

UPDATE 2016-05-23

With the release of CapLoader 1.4 it is now possible to apply Display Filters not only to the Flows tab, but also to the Services and Hosts tab.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Monday, 30 November 2015 08:15:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #CapLoader​ #BPF​ #PCAP​ #Berkeley Packet Filter​ #filter​ #IP​ #port​ #CIDR​