Year Archives: 2021

nProbe

Handling Traffic Directions with sFlow/NetFlow/IPFIX
Network interfaces natively support RX and TX directions, so tools such as ntopng can detect the traffic directions and depict this information accordingly. In the above picture that ntopng shows in the top menubar, TX traffic is depicted in blue and RX in green. All simple. Now suppose you need to analyse sFlow/NetFlow/IPFIX flows, and be interested to understand how much traffic leaves/enters your network. Example suppose you generate IPFIX flows on your Internet gateway: how much of this traffic is sent to the Internet and how much is received? …
nProbe

nProbe IPS: How To setup an Inline Layer-7 Traffic Policer in 5 Minutes
Introduction Recently, we have added Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) capabilities to our nProbe. Those capabilities are available starting from the latest 9.5 version, both for Linux and FreeBSD – including OPNsense and pfSense, and are available with all nProbe versions and licenses (see the product page for additional details). On Linux, nProbe leverages the netfilter framework. In essence, the kernel send packets to nProbe via NF_QUEUE which, in turn, gives each packet a pass/drop verdict so that it can be dropped or let it continue its journey through the network. …
Cybersecurity

How to Spot Unsafe Communications using nDPI Flow Risk Score
nDPI it is much more than a DPI library used to detect the application protocol. In the past year, nDPI has grown in terms of cybersecurity features used to detect threats and network issues leveraging on the concept of flow risk. Each nDPI-analysed flow has associated a numerical flow risk that in essence is a bitmap with a bit set to 1 whenever a risk has been detected for such flow. The list of (to date) supported flow risks are: HTTP suspicious user-agent HTTP numeric IP host contacted HTTP suspicious …
Cybersecurity

On Network Visibility and Cybersecurity
Today we had the change to talk about network visibility and cybersecurity during an event organised by the Milan Internet Exchange MIX-IT. In this talk we have presented the current state of development in this area at ntop and provided an outlook of some of the features that we’re developing and that will be released later this summer. These are the presentation slides for those who didn’t have the change to attend the event. Enjoy ! …
Announce

May 27th: Webinar on DPI-based traffic enforcement, ntop tools on pfSense/OPNsense
For a long time, ntop mainly focused on passive traffic analysis. As cybersecurity is becoming a main concern for many organisation and individuals, we have boosted our tools by introducing facilities for spotting threats and blocking unsafe traffic. This month we will organise a webinar that will cover two main topics: How to use the nProbe IPS mode to block traffic based on nDPI and other traffic policies. Tutorial on using ntopng and nProbe on pfSense/OPNsense. This event took place on Thursday May 27th at 4PM CET / 10AM EST. …
nProbe

Introducing nProbe IPS: 10 Gbit nDPI-based Traffic Policer and Shaper
This is to introduce a new nProbe feature that brings IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) support via nDPI for Linux and FreeBSD (including OPNsense and pfSense). As shown in the picture below, nProbe acts as a transparent bridge (with kernel offload) for applying pass/drop/shape rules to the forwarded traffic. Our goal is to combine the power of DPI and nDPI cybersecurity features to all nProbe users. When deployed on a firewall/gateway (including OPNsense/pfSense), nProbe can both monitor and apply policies to monitored traffic. Typical use case include (but are not limited …
Cybersecurity

Combining nDPI and Wireshark for Cybersecurity Traffic Analysis
At the upcoming Sharkfest Europe 2021 we’ll talk about using Wireshark in cybersecurity. Part of the talk will focus on nDPI and Wireshark integration. Since the last release nDPI features flow risk analysis, that is basically a numerical indication of potential risks associated with a network communication ranging from ‘TLS Certificate Expired’ to more complicated ‘Suspicious DGA domain name’ and ‘SQL injection’. You can find a comprehensive list of increasingly growing risks here. For the impatiens, this is a quick guide on how to play with this integration. Prerequisite Download …
ntopng

Detecting and Analysing Qakbot Traffic Using ntopng
In this post Martin shows how he has used ntopng to detect Qakbot trojan. Many thanks for this contribution. Introduction I am using ntopng for network monitoring quite some time now and I was curios to see, what ntopng would alert when detecting malware. The website malware traffic analysis is a great source for malware captured in network traffic. I decided to take a Qakbot infection with spambot activity [1]. From the pcap file name we see to expect Qakbot, a active [2] banking trojan [3] Cobalt Strike, a commercial …
nProbe

Best Practices for High Speed Flow Collection
Most people use nProbe and ntopng to collect flows using an architecture similar to the one below where nprobe and ntopng are started as follows: nprobe -3 <collector port> -i none -n none —zmq "tcp://*:1234" --zmq-encryption-key <pub key> ntopng -i tcp://nprobe_host:1234 --zmq-encryption-key <pub key> In this case ntopng communicates with nProbe over an encrypted channel and flows are sent in a compact binary format for maximum performance. If you do not need nProbe to cache and aggregate flows, you can also add --collector-passthrough on the nProbe side to further increase …
ntopng

What is Score, and How It can Drive You Towards Network Issues
Telemetry protocols such as sFlow/NetFlow, SNMP or packet-based traffic analysis are the source of data for network traffic monitoring. For a long time visibility was the main issue and people were attracted by new tools such as Grafana that allowed them to put on a screen a lot of data. A big misconception in this area is that the more data you see the less you understand as networks are constantly growing in both size and complexity and adding second or a third screen a PC isn’t the perfect way …
nProbe

How To Monitor Traffic Behind a Firewall (During and Post Pandemic)
Due to pandemic, many people are now working in a delocalised world: some work from home, others from the office. To make things even more complicated, in the past remote workers used to connect to the company network via a VPN. While this option is still possible, many resources are now available from the cloud thus making VPNs obsolete in some environments, in particular for mobile workforce that connects to the Internet by means of a cellular network. In the past months, some people contact us to ask how they …
Announce

Join FOSDEM 2021 ntop sessions, Sat-Sun Feb 6-7th (online)
We are proud to announce that a couple of talks have been accepted at FOSDEM 2021, one of the most important FOSS conferences in the world that this yar will take place online due to the pandemic. In the Network monitoring, discovery and inventory devroom we will give two presentations titled “Using nDPI for  Monitoring and Security” and  “ntopng network monitoring and discovery“. In addition, ntop has been given a virtual stand to present its opensource-related activities. The ntop team will always be available in a chatroom and a series …

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