ntopng

nProbe

Collecting Flows from Hundred of Routers Using Observation Points
Collecting flows on large networks with hundred of routers can be challenging. Beside the number of flows to be collected, another key point is to be able to visualize the informations in a simple yet effective way. ntopng allows you to create up to 32 virtual flow collection interfaces that can be used to avoid merging collected flows: unfortunately they are not enough when collecting flows from 100+ routers. In the latest ntopng and nProbe dev versions (soon to become stable), we have implemented the concept of observation point, that …
nProbe

NetFlow/IPFIX At Scale: Comparing nProbe/ClickHouse vs nProbe/ntopng
In our previous post we have analysed the performance of the pipeline nProbe+ntopng for those who need to collect flows and analyse them, trigger alerts, create timeseries, provide a realtime monitoring console, dump them to nIndex and inform remote recipients in case of some problem is detected. This is the main difference between the ntop solution and a NetFlow collector whose main goal is to dump flows on a database with any or little flow analysis. In essence the current state of the art with 4 nProbe instances sending data …
nProbe

NetFlow Collection Performance Using ntopng and nProbe
Introduction ntopng, in combination with nProbe, can be used to collect NetFlow. Their use for NetFlow collection is described in detail here. In this post we measure the performance of nProbe and ntopng when used together to collect, analyze, and dump NetFlow data. The idea is to provide performance figures useful to understand the maximum rate at which NetFlow can be processed without loss of data. Before giving the actual figures, it is worth discussing briefly the most relevant unit of measure that will be used, i.e., the number of …
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 …
Announce

Bringing Network Visibility, Cybersecurity and Encrypted Traffic Analysis to OPNsense, pfSense and FreeBSD
This is to announce the immediate availability of both ntopng and nProbe for OPNsense, pfSense and FreeBSD, directly supported by ntop, with nightly builds and all the features present on all other supported platforms such as Linux, Windows and MacOS. You can now Monitor network traffic based on nDPI. Encrypted traffic analysis (ETA) that enables you to have visibility of encrypted traffic and answer to questions such as: what portion of my available bandwidth is used by Netflix? Cyber threats analysis: ntopng con be used to effectively detect attacks, anomalies …
Guides

ntopng, InfluxDB and Grafana: A Step-By-Step Guide to Create Dashboards
Creating Grafana dashboards out of ntopng data basically boils down to: Configuring ntopng to export timeseries data to InfluxDB Configuring the Grafana InfluxDB datasource to extract timeseries data from InfluxDB Adding Grafana Dashboards panels with ntopng data This post aims at covering the topics above to serve as reference for those who want to create Grafana dashboards. Configuring ntopng to Export Timeseries Data to InfluxDB To configure ntopng to export timeseries data to InfluxDB, visit the ntopng Timeseries preferences page, and pick InfluxDB as driver. Then, it suffices to configure …
nDPI

Efficiently Detecting and Blocking SunBurst Malware
Earlier this month a new highly evasive malware attacker named SunBurst has been disclosed. Immediately some countermeasures have been disclosed and in particular some Snort/Suricata rules have been published. We have analysed the rules trying to figure out if ntop tools could detect and block Sunburst and the answer is yes, you can. Let’s have a look at some of the rules. The first thing you can observe is that the rules are any/any, meaning that an IDS has to look into every single connection this because most IDS do …
n2disk

Exploiting Arista MetaWatch with n2disk and ntopng: HighRes Timestamping and Analytics
Precise packet timestamping is a key feature for network traffic analysis and troubleshooting. Traditionally many people use FPGA-based NICs with precise timestamping (e.g. Napatech, Silicom) even though a good precision can be obtained with PTP-based NICs such as many Intel network adapters. A better alternative to this practice is to avoid ad all using specialised adapters and rely on existing network devices to timestamp packets. Arista packet brokers with MetaWatch  can be configured to add an extra trailer (Metamako) with metadata to every captured packet. In fact Arista 7150 Series …

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