ntopng

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 …

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! …

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 …

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 …

This February we’ll introduce ntopng v4 and we’re starting to write some blog posts to preview the new features. Let’s start with the user interface. Since v1 the UI has always been the same. People however asked us some more flexible layout where it is possible for instance to switch across network interfaces in a breeze. Furthermore the pervasive use of dark themes was also a driving force towards changes. While the UI in 4.2 will integrate new changes we already planned (for instance to switch from realtime to historical …

One of the most useful features in applications, is the ability to Update the application with a matter of click with no need to move to the terminal console. Instruct the system to update the application as a new version is available. We have realised that many of our users missed this feature in ntopng for a long time, and so we decided to implement it. As this feature depends on the operating system, we have decided to implement it for all the Linux distributions (sorry, no Windows support) for …

ntop tools are known for monitoring network traffic. However this traffic has to flow on physical networks and thus it is important to understand the physical network layout. LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol) is a network protocol used to dynamically build network topologies and identify network device neighbours. In the latest ntopng dev build (that will be merged in the next v4 stable) we have enhanced the SNMP monitoring capabilities with LLDP support. if your SNMP devices have LLDP enabled, ntopng now polls this information and build an adjacency graph …

In short: encryption does not always mean that all the information exchanged is really encrypted. Another myth is that many people believe that the equation “encryption = security” holds. Unfortunately this is not true. This slide deck we presented at Sharkfest Europe 19 shows in practical terms what information is sent in clear text in popular protocol as well what information encrypted TLS traffic reports unencrypted. Enjoy! …