NetworkMiner 2.6 Released

We are happy to announce the release of NetworkMiner 2.6 today! The network forensic tool is now even better at extracting emails, password hashes, FTP transfers and artifacts from HTTP and HTTP/2 traffic than before.

Some of the major improvements in this new release are related to extraction and presentation of emails from SMTP, POP3 and IMAP traffic. On that note, we’d like to thank Mandy van Oosterhout for reporting a bug in our email parser!

I have previously blogged about how to extract John-the-Ripper hashes from Kerberos network traffic with NetworkMiner. We have now added support for presenting LANMAN and NTLM credentials as JtR hashes as well.

We have also improved NetworkMiner’s Linux support. Files, images and folders can now be opened in external tools directly from the NetworkMiner GUI also when running NetworkMiner in Linux using Mono 6 (or later). Linux users previously got a “System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception” error message saying something like “Cannot find the specified file” or “Access denied” due to a breaking change introduced in Mono version 6.

The new release also comes with several updates of how HTTP and HTTP/2 traffic is handled and presented. We have, for example, added better extraction of data sent in HTTP (or HTTP/2) POST requests. Posted JSON formatted parameters are also extracted even if the JSON data has been gzip compressed. The “Accept-Language” header values in HTTP and HTTP/2 are extracted as “Host Details” in order to support forensic analysis of user language settings, as shown by Fox-IT in their “Operation Wocao - Shining a light on one of China’s hidden hacking groups” report.

NetworkMiner has supported decapsulation of tunneling protocols and protocols for network virtualization, like 802.1Q, GRE, PPPoE, VXLAN, OpenFlow, MPLS and EoMPLS, since version 2.1. We have now improved our GRE parser to also support NVGRE (RFC 7637) by adding support for Transparent Ethernet Bridging.

Jan Hesse sent us a feature request on Twitter earlier this year, where asked about support for FritzBox captures. We are happy to announce that NetworkMiner now supports the modified pcap format you get when sniffing network traffic with a FritzBox gateway.

NetworkMiner 2.6 can now also parse and extract SIP chat messages (RFC 3428) to the “Messages” tab. Audio extraction of VoIP calls is still a feature that is exclusively available only in NetworkMiner Professional though.

NetworkMiner Professional

Our commercial tool NetworkMiner Professional has received a few additional updates, such as support for analysis of HTTP/2 traffic in the “Browsers tab”. However, please note that NetworkMiner does not perform TLS decryption, so the HTTP/2 traffic will have to be decrypted by a TLS proxy like PolarProxy prior to being saved to a PCAP file.

We have added a few new great online services to NetworkMiner Pro’s OSINT lookup as well, such as shouldiclick.org, Browserling, MalwareDomainList and VirusTotal lookups of URL’s in the “Browsers” tab. We have also added some additional external OSINT sources for lookups of IP addresses and domain names, such as MalwareDomainList and mnemonic ACT. The JA3 hash lookup menu in NetworkMiner Professional’s “Hosts” tab has also been extended to include GreyNoise.

NetworkMiner Pro previously played back G.722 VoIP audio at half speed. This issue has now been fixed, so that G.722 RTP audio is extracted and played back in 16k samples/s. The bug was due to an error in RFC 1890 that was later corrected in RFC 3551. Thanks to Michael "MiKa" Kafka for teaching us about this!

Excerpt from RFC 3551:

Even though the actual sampling rate for G.722 audio is 16,000 Hz, the RTP clock rate for the G722 payload format is 8,000 Hz because that value was erroneously assigned in RFC 1890 and must remain unchanged for backward compatibility. The octet rate or sample-pair rate is 8,000 Hz.

We’d also like to mention that NetworkMiner Professional now comes with improved analytical support to help investigators detect Tor traffic.

Upgrading to Version 2.6

Users who have purchased a license for NetworkMiner Professional 2.x can download a free update to version 2.6 from our customer portal, or use the “Help > Check for Updates” feature. Those who instead prefer to use the free and open source version can grab the latest version of NetworkMiner from the official NetworkMiner page.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Wednesday, 23 September 2020 09:10:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #SMTP​ #POP3​ #IMAP​ #email​ #FTP​ #JtR​ #John​ #Mono​ #Linux​ #HTTP​ #HTTP/2​ #JSON​ #GRE​ #SIP​ #VoIP​ #Tor​ #PCAP​

NetworkMiner 2.1 Released

We are releasing a new version of NetworkMiner today. The latest and greatest version of NetworkMiner is now 2.1.

Yay! /throws confetti in the air

Better Email Parsing

I have spent some time during 2016 talking to digital forensics experts at various law enforcement agencies. I learned that from time to time criminals still fail to use encryption when reading their email. This new release of NetworkMiner therefore comes with parsers for POP3 and IMAP as well as an improved SMTP parser. These are the de facto protocols used for sending and receiving emails, and have been so since way back in the 90’s.

Not only does NetworkMiner show the contents of emails within the tool, it also extracts all attachments to disk and even saves each email as an .eml file that can be opened in an external email reader in order to view it as the suspect would.

Encapsulation Protocols

There are several protocols that can be used to provide logical separation of network traffic, in order to avoid using multiple physical networks to keep various network segments, security domains or users apart. Some of these techniques for logical separation rely on tagging or labeling, while others are tunneling the encapsulated traffic. Nevertheless, it’s all pretty much the same thing; an encapsulation protocol is used in order to wrap protocol X inside protocol Y, usually while adding some metadata in the process.

NetworkMiner has been able to parse the classic encapsulation protocols 802.1Q, GRE and PPPoE since 2011, but we now see an increased use of protocols that provide logical separation for virtualization and cloud computing environments. We have therefore added parsers in NetworkMiner 2.1 for VXLAN and OpenFlow, which are the two most widely used protocols for logical separation of traffic in virtualized environments. We have also added decapsulation of MPLS and EoMPLS (Ethernet-over-MPLS) to NetworkMiner 2.1.

The new release additionally comes with support for the SOCKS protocol, which is an old school encapsulation protocol used by administrators as well as hackers in order to bypass firewalls or provide anonymous Internet access. The SOCKS parser in NetworkMiner can even be used to read network traffic from Tor in cleartext before it enters the Tor network. However, in order to capture Tor’s SOCKS traffic you’ll have to sniff traffic from the Tor client’s localhost interface on TCP port 9150.

PacketCache

NetworkMiner 2.1 can read packets directly from a local PacketCache service by clicking ”File > Read from PacketCache”. This eliminates the need to run a PowerShell script in order to dump a PCAP file with packets recently captured by PacketCache.

HTTP Partial Content / Range Requests

Byte serving is a feature in HTTP that makes it possible to retrieve only a segment of a file, rather than the complete file, by using the “Range” HTTP header. This feature is often used by BITS in order to download updates for Windows. But we have also seen malware use byte serving, for example malware droppers that attempt to download malicious payloads in a stealthy manner. See Ursnif and Dridex for examples of malware that utilize this technique.

NetworkMiner has previously only reassembled the individual segments of a partial content download. But as of version 2.1 NetworkMiner has the ability to piece together the respective parts into a complete file.

SSL/TLS and X.509 Certificates

NetworkMiner has been able to extract X.509 certificates to disk for many years now, simply by opening a PCAP file with SSL traffic. However, in the 2.1 release we’ve added support for parsing out the SSL details also from FTP’s “AUTH TLS” (a.k.a explicit TLS or explicit SSL) and STARTTLS in SMTP.

NetworkMiner now also extracts details from the SSL handshake and X.509 certificate to the Parameters tab, such as the requested SNI hostname and the Subject CN from the certificate.

NetworkMiner Professional

The new features mentioned so far are all part of the free open source version of NetworkMiner. But we have also added a few additional features to the Professional edition of NetworkMiner as part of the 2.1 release.

The “Browsers” tab of NetworkMiner Professional has been extended with a feature for tracking online ads and web trackers. We are using EasyList and EasyPrivacy from easylist.to in order to provide an up-to-date tracking of ads and trackers. HTTP requests related to ads are colored red, while web tracker requests are blue. These colors also apply to the Files tab and can be modified in the Settings menu (Tools > Settings).

The reason why NetworkMiner Pro now tracks ads and trackers is because these types of requests can make up almost half of the HTTP requests that a normal user makes while surfing the web today. Doing forensics on network traffic from a suspect criminal can be a very time consuming task, we therefore hope that being able to differentiate between what traffic that is initiated by the user rather than being triggered by an online advertisement service or internet tracker can save time for investigators.

The RIPE database previously contained a bug that prevented NetworkMiner Professional from properly leveraging netname info from RIPE. This bug has now been fixed, so that the Host Details can be enriched with details from RIPE for IP addresses in Europe. To enable the RIPE database you’ll first have to download the raw data by clicking Tools > Download RIPE DB.

We have also extended the exported details about the hosts in the CSV and XML files from NetworkMiner Professional and the command line tool NetworkMinerCLI. The exported information now contains details such as IP Time-to-Live and open ports.

Upgrading to version 2.1

Users who have purchased a license for NetworkMiner Professional 2.0 can download a free update to version 2.1 from our customer portal.

Those who instead prefer to use the free and open source version can grab the latest version of NetworkMiner from the official NetworkMiner page.

Credits

There are several persons I would like to thank for contributing with feature requests and bug reports that have been used to improve NetworkMiner. I would like to thank Dietrich Hasselhorn, Christian Reusch, Jasper Bongertz, Eddi Blenkers and Daniel Spiekermann for their feedback that have helped improve the SMB, SMB2 and HTTP parsers as well as implementing various encapsulation protocols. I would also like to thank several investigators at the Swedish, German and Dutch police as well as EUROPOL for the valuable feedback provided by them.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Wednesday, 11 January 2017 14:30:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #POP3​ #SMTP​ #IMAP​ #VXLAN​ #X.509​ #PCAP​

Chinese MITM attack on outlook.com

We were contacted by GreatFire.org earlier today regarding a new Chinese man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. This time the perpetrators decrypted traffic between Chinese users and Microsoft's IMAP mail server for outlook.com. As evidence GreatFire.org provided us with a packet capture file, which we have analyzed.

Our conclusion is that this was a real attack on Microsoft's email service. Additionally, the attack is very similar to previous nationwide Chinese attacks on SSL encrypted traffic, such as the attack on Google a few months ago. Details such as email address, email password, email contents, email attachments and contacts may have been compromised in this attack. We do not know the scale of the attack, it could be anything from a fairly targeted attack to a nation wide attack in China. What we do know is that there are several users who have been subjected to the MITM attack and posted screenshots online.

Technical Analysis

In our technical analysis we first extracted the x509 certificates from the SSL traffic by loading the capture file into NetworkMinerCLI. We then parsed the extracted certificates with OpenSSL.

$ mono /opt/NetworkMinerProfessional_1-6-1/NetworkMinerCLI.exe -r Outlook_MITM_2015-01-18.pcapng
Closing file handles...
84 frames parsed in 0.888754 seconds.
$ ls AssembledFiles/157.56.195.250/TLS_Cert\ -\ TCP\ 993/*.cer
AssembledFiles/157.56.195.250/TLS_Cert - TCP 993/hotmail.com[1].cer
AssembledFiles/157.56.195.250/TLS_Cert - TCP 993/hotmail.com[2].cer
AssembledFiles/157.56.195.250/TLS_Cert - TCP 993/hotmail.com.cer
$ openssl x509 -inform DER -in AssembledFiles/157.56.195.250/TLS_Cert\ -\ TCP\ 993/hotmail.com.cer -noout -issuer -subject -startdate -fingerprint
issuer= /CN=*.hotmail.com
subject= /CN=*.hotmail.com
notBefore=Jan 15 16:00:00 2015 GMT
SHA1 Fingerprint=75:F4:11:59:5F:E9:A2:1A:17:A4:96:7C:7B:66:6E:51:52:79:1A:32

When looking at the timestamps in the capture file we noticed that the SSL server's reply to the 'Client Hello' was very slow; response times varied between 14 and 20 seconds. Under normal circumstances the 'Server Hello' arrives within 0.3 seconds after the 'Client Hello' has been sent.

$ tshark -nr ./Outlook_MITM_2015-01-18.pcapng -Y 'ssl.handshake.type lt 3'
8 9.023876000 10.0.2.15 -> 157.56.195.250 SSL 265 Client Hello
17 26.885504000 157.56.195.250 -> 10.0.2.15 TLSv1 576 Server Hello, Certificate, Server Hello Done
45 101.747755000 10.0.2.15 -> 157.56.195.250 SSL 265 Client Hello
49 116.258483000 157.56.195.250 -> 10.0.2.15 TLSv1 576 Server Hello, Certificate, Server Hello Done
63 116.338420000 10.0.2.15 -> 157.56.195.250 SSL 265 Client Hello
65 136.119127000 157.56.195.250 -> 10.0.2.15 TLSv1 576 Server Hello, Certificate, Server Hello Done
[...]

This is slow SSL response is consistent with previous SSL MITM attacks conducted with support of the Great Firewall of China (GFW).

For more details on this attack, please see the Reuters story "After Gmail blocked in China, Microsoft's Outlook hacked" and GreatFire's own blog post "Outlook grim - Chinese authorities attack Microsoft".

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Monday, 19 January 2015 22:55:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #Netresec​ #PCAP​ #PCAPNG​ #GFW​ #MITM​ #China​ #Hotmail​ #IMAP​ #IMAPS​ #SSL​