Dumping sFlow/NetFlow/IPFIX flows in pcap format can be very useful for troubleshooting or for creating a compact traffic dump. For instance you can dump flow traffic with n2disk (wireshark, or tcpdump) and store them in pcap format, and eventually share them with a shared disk or sent via email. Flows are usually analysed live with […]
Hardware Traffic Duplication on Intel Adapters Using PF_RING
Those of you who are familiar with kernel-bypass drivers like PF_RING ZC know that it is not possible to run multiple applications on top of the same Network interface and capture the same traffic twice. This is the case of Intel and most FPGA adapters. In fact, since the application takes full control of the adapter […]
Using Python (including Jupyter Notebook) with ntopng
Most programmers and network/security administrators are familiar with the Python language. As from time to time we receive requests from our users for creating custom reports, or extracting other type of data (e.g. alerts or timeseries) from ntopng, we have decided to create a Python API for ntopng. Such API allows developers to extract data […]
HowTo Monitor Zoom Performance and Video/Call Quality
Zoom is a popular platform for video communications and team collaboration. As many other cloud services, network administrators need to supervise Zoom network traffic usage. DPI toolkits such as nDPI are useful for identifying Zoom traffic for supervising the network bandwidth used by your Zoom calls. Recently we have took advantage of this research work […]
Deploying ntopng at Scale: Jessa Ziekenhuis
This is a report from one of our users from the field, who decided to use ntopng to monitor a large network. Many thanks to Bjorn for sharing this information with our community. Our network Jessa Ziekenhuis is one of the biggest, non-academic, hospitals in Belgium. Spread over 4 campuses, we manage 3 data […]
nTap
nTap Virtual Network Tap for Hosts/Cloud/Containers/VMs nTap is a virtual software tap that can be used in physical/virtual/cloud environments to remotely capture traffic (with respect to the monitoring location) and delivering packets to the observation point in a secure way. Packet capture is required whenever flow-based analysis tools such as nProbe/nProbe Cento are not suitable […]
How to Configure Flow Risk Exclusions in nDPI and ntopng
Flow risks are the mechanism nDPI implements for detecting issues in network traffic whose theoretical design is documented in this paper Using Deep Packet Inspection in CyberTraffic Analysis we have written last year. While we are reworking the definition of risk exceptions in ntopng to make them fully configurable with a matter of clicks, you […]
How ntopng monitors IEC 60870-5-104 traffic
Busy times for OT analysts. Last month the number of known OT (operational technology) malware increased from five to seven. First malware discovered is Industroyer2 which was caught in the Ukraine. As nowadays popular, security companies name the malware they discover. That is why for the second malware two names were assigned, Incontroller or Pipedream. […]
Incident Analysis: How to Correlate Alerts with Flows and Packets
In incident analysis it is important to provide evidence of the problem at various level of details: Alerts Alerts are the result of traffic analysis (in ntopng based on checks) that have detected specific indicators in traffic that triggered the alert. For instance a host whose behavioural score has exceeded a given threshold or a […]
How Attackers and Victims Detection works in ntopng
In recent ntopng versions, alerts have been significantly enriched with metadata useful to understand network and security issues. In this post, we focus on the “Attacker” and “Victim” metadata, used to enrich flow alerts and label hosts. Specifically, the client or the server of a flow is labelled as “Attacker” when it is, with high […]