ntopng

Cybersecurity

Mice and Elephants: HowTo Detect and Monitor Periodic Traffic
Most people are used to top X: top senders, top receivers, top protocols. So in essence they are looking for elephants. While this is a good practice, mice are also very interesting as they can often be hidden in the noise. In cybersecurity noise is very good for attackers as they often try to hide themselves on it; this is in order to escape security. Many malware are programmed on a for loop fashion: do a), do b) do c) then go back to a) on an infinite loop. In …
nDPI

Howto Identify and Block Telegram-based Botnets
Botnets are a popular way to run malware on a network using the command and control paradigm. Popular protocols used by botnets include IRC and HTTP. Most IDSs can detect bots as long as they can inspect the network traffic. This makes networks administrators blind when bots move to encrypted and cloud-based (i.e. that you cannot block with a simple IP-based ACL) protocols. The popular Telegram messaging system allows people to create a bot in minutes as shown in the code excerpt below.   bot = Bot(token) def run(): """ …
nDPI

Trickbot Malware Analysis Using nDPI and ntopng
Trickbot is a malware distributed via malspam, spam emails containing links for downloading malicious files that infect computers.  A pcap file of a trickbot infection named 2019-09-25-Trickbot-gtag-ono19-infection-traffic.pcap can be downloaded at this URL. You can analyse the file using nDPI as follows ndpiReader -i 2019-09-25-Trickbot-gtag-ono19-infection-traffic.pcap -v 2 -J > /tmp/trickbot.txt Let’s now open the trickbot.txt file and search for “Risk”. This is a tag added to nDPI analysed flows when there is a non-zero security risk associated with the analysed traffic. Most problems include: Obsolete TLS protocol with self-signed certificate …
ntopng

How Active Monitoring Works in ntopng
In v4 we have introduced active monitoring in ntopng and since then we are improving in the 4.1.x development versions. In order to enable it you have to selectd the “System” interface from the top menubar and select “Active Monitoring” from the left “System” menu. On that page you will see a table containing all your measurements. The code has been written in a modular way, so that available measurements can be extended as necessary simply adding a new lua script. As you can see from the measurements source, you …
ntopng

Implementing Network Visibility in Covid-19 Days
Ongoing health emergency demands business to enable employee work from home: call it smart working or (better) remote working. This process puts pressure on the company Internet connection as many (if not all) the activities need to be done remotely. Working from home is a good practice in order to avoid extra personal stress and reduce virus spread, this only if company’s Internet lines have enough capacity to handle all the remote workers. How can you measure this extra traffic (with respect to days before the emergency) and optimise your …
ntop

ntopng 4.0: A Refreshed Look with Dark Themes!
The latest ntopng 4.0 has a renewed look. The main changes we have introduced are: An always-on-top status bar. Key information on the health and status of the network is essential for the analyst and it must be always visible and easily accessible. This is why we have introduced an always-on-top fixed status bar with key information such as network throughput, active hosts, flows, and ongoing alerts. This information was previously placed at the bottom of every page so it was difficult to access it and a lot of scrolling …
ntopng

Active Monitoring in ntopng 4.0: ICMP, ICMPv6, HTTP and HTTPS pings with RTT
The latest stable ntopng 4.0 features a Round Trip Time (RTT) monitor which is capable of pinging hosts on a minute-by-minute basis to check: IP reachability with ICMP and ICMPv6 pings Web servers functionality with HTTP and HTTPS pings Checks account for the RTT, that is, the time it takes to reach a certain host and receive a response from it. ntopng shows all the RTT-monitored hosts under the System Interface   For each monitored host ntopng offers the following information The full URL of the monitored host. The URL …
Announce

Introducing ntopng for MacOS. Finally.
For a long time out MacOS users asked a native ntopng package. Even though we use MacOS and Linux to develop our tools, we didn’t consider important to revamp the MacOS installer (ntopng 1.x has a native MacOS installer) as there are solutions such as brew.sh that allow you to install packages. However such tools are not for all Mac users who not necessarily like to use the command line. Thus we have created a native package that installs in one click all the required components (e.g. Redis) needed by …
ntopng

Extending ntopng by Means of Plugins: A Step-by-Step Tutorial
ntopng v4 has introduced the concept of plugins that are short scripts written in Lua. They allow people to code ntopng extensions for triggering alerts when specific conditions are met, or extend the engine by adding new external data feeds. Possibilities are manyfold. In the next ntopng release we want to simplify the addition of new plugins as well create a public repository for adding them with a matter of clicks. This video tutorial is a step-by-step lesson that shows you how ntopng plugins can be developed. Enjoy! …
ntop

Say Hello To ntopng 4.0: Cybersecurity, Scripting… and a New User Interface
After over one year of work, we’re proud to announce you that ntopng 4.0 is finally out. In this time we have redesigned ntopng for speed and openness, by breaking apart the existing monolithic C++ engine into a Lua-scriptable micro-engine. This is to enable people to contribute to the project without them being scared of coding in C++. The major breakthroughs we have brought with this release are: A plugin engine that allows anyone with some basic Lua coding skills to tap straight into every single flow, host, or other …
ntopng

Securing Flow Collection Using Data Encryption
NetFlow/IPFIX specifications have not considered privacy and confidentiality important. Exported flows are sent over unencrypted channels that prevent them to be exchanged on public networks unless techniques such as VPNs are used. Today encryption is no longer an option, and thus we have added encryption support in all our tools when flows are exchanged over ZMQ channels (e.g. when nProbe sends flows to ntopng). In order to use encryption a private/public keypair needs to be generated on the collector side (i.e. ntopng) and configured on all the probe applications sending …
ntopng

How We Managed to Turn ntopng Into a Cybersecurity Tool
Last year you have read how we have integrated Suricata support into ntopng. While an IDS is a good source of data, it is just a sensor, how has no knowledge of the big network picture including the network overview, past host/flow history and device type. In essence an IDS is a nice to have but it’s not enough. What it is necessary is the ability to analyse traffic, learn what is wrong, compare current behaviour with the past, and draw some conclusions (i.e. read them as emit alerts) that …

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