All Blog Posts

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 …
ntop

Dec 10th, ntop miniconf 2020 part III: nProbe and n2disk (on embedded systems)

This is a reminder for the third and last part of our mini-conference 2020 scheduled for this Thursday, December 10th 4 PM CET/10 AM EST. This time we’ll focus on the latest nProbe and n2disk features and provide a short practical tutorial. In addition we’ll cover ntopng alert and endpoints. Finally we’ll discuss how to embed ntop toolsin small devices for ubiquitous monitoring Below you can find all details, including the webinar link and calendar entry. Luca Deri: nProbe Traffic Monitoring and Embedding Carlos Talbot: Embedding ntopng on Ubiquity UDM …
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 …
Announce

Dec 3rd, ntop miniconf 2020 part II: ntopng

This is a reminder for the second part of our mini-conference 2020 scheduled for this Thursday, December 3rd 4 PM CET/10 AM EST. This time we’ll focus on the latest ntopng 4.2 features. We have the pleasure to host our friends at Tribe29 that will preview how ntopng has been integrated with CheckMK, Nextworks and Verxo that will talk about using ntopng and ntopng Edge in real use cases, and Cubro who will present a new product that embeds ntopng. Below you can find all details, including the webinar link …
ntop

Using ntopng as network sensor for SecurityOnion (and integrated with Suricata)

SecurityOnion (SO) is a popular Linux distribution for threat hunting and security. It included ElasticSearch as backend for storing alerts as well as Kibana-based web interface. SO includes out of the box a few sensors such as Suricata that is a signature-based IDS used for flow analysis. To date SO does not include a tool that is able to merge network and security analysis or that can collect input from sensors and provide a high-level consolidated alert (e.g. a DoS vs individual alerts generated by Suricata). As most of our …
ntop

Embedding ntop: Nokia Beacon and Ubiquity UniFi Dream Machine

The latest generation of network devices are pretty powerful and open. This means that such devices ship with a Linux-based distribution such as OpenWRT or UniFI OS. In these devices it is possible to install third party software as the CPU is pretty powerful, there is some storage and memory available for running additional applications. In this blog post we want to describe our experience with two of these devices where it is possible to install ntop tools. This allows the network traffic to be monitored without having to install …
ntop

Using ntop tools on VyOS

VyOS  is a popular open-source router and firewall platform based on Linux, and some of our users asked us to support it natively. This post explains you how to achieve that in a few simple steps. Prerequisites As VyOS is based on Debian Linux, the easiest solution is to install precompiled Debian packages or compile it from source. In order to do this you need to configure the Debian repositories that on VyOS are empty. You need (as root) to edit /etc/apt/sources.list and store on it something like this: deb …
ntopng

You’re Invited to the ntop MiniConference 2020: November 24th, December 3rd and 10th

This year due to the pandemic, we had to cancel our scheduled community event. Considered that we have introduced many new features in our tools we would like to invite you to an online mini-conference divided in three distinct events. The first event is a general even where we briefly summarise what we have done in the individual tools so people can have an overview of what we have done and where we would like to go. The other two events are instead focusing on specific tools so people can …
ntopng

Howto Write a Telegram Alert Endpoint for ntopng

Telegram is a popular messaging application that many people use daily to do instant messaging and receive notifications. As of ntopng 4.2, it is now possible to deliver alerts to external entities including Slack, email and Discord. This post will show you how the Telegram alert endpoint has been developed so that readers can learn how to contribute to the ntopng development by coding new integrations. For a complete guide about alert endpoints, please refer to the ntopng user’s guide, whereas the complete telegram endpoint source code can be found …
News

Say Hello to ntopng 4.2: Flexible Alerting, Major Speedup, Scada, Cybersecurity

We are pleased to introduce ntopng 4.2 that introduces several new features and breakthroughs while consolidating the changes introduced with 4.0. The main goals of this release include Enhance and simplify how alerts are delivered to consumers Many internal components of ntopng have been rewritten in order to improve the overall ntopng performance, reduce system load, and capable of processing more data while reducing memory usage with respect to 4.0. Cybersecurity extensions have been greatly enhanced by leveraging on the latest nDPI enhancements that enabled the creation of several user …
nProbe

Introducing nProbe 9.2: Collection Pass-Through and Reforge, OpenWRT support, Flexible JSON-export

This is to announce the release of nProbe 9.2. The main new features of this release are focused on flow collection speed and flexibility in particular for modern JSON-based flow consumers. This is to enable applications relying on nProbe, e.g. ntopng, to scale up when collecting flows: The new –collector-passthrough option allows the flow cache to be bypassed when flows are collected. This mean that flows are forwarded to remote collectors unmodified (i.e. -T is not used) without placing them into the flow cache (i.e. flows are not merged by …
Cybersecurity

Security-Centric Traffic Analysis

Days ago we have given a short speak about cybersecurity at an Italian meetup. These are the presentation slides (English) where you can read more about the steps we have taken to make our tools more cybersecurity-oriented. Below you can also find the video that is only for Italian-speaking people (sorry about that). Enjoy!   …