NetworkMiner 2.7.3 Released

NetworkMiner now extracts meterpreter payloads from reverse shells and performs offline lookups of JA3 hashes and TLS certificates. Our commercial tool, NetworkMiner Professional, additionally comes with a packet carver that extracts network packets from memory dumps.

Extraction of Meterpreter Payloads

NetworkMiner 2.7.3 supports extraction of meterpreter DLL payloads from reverse shell TCP sessions deployed with Metasploit. The free version of NetworkMiner will try to extract the meterpreter DLL from TCP sessions going to "poker-hand ports" commonly used for meterpreter sessions, such as 3333, 4444, 5555, etc. The port-independent protocol detection feature available in NetworkMiner Professional additionally enables extraction of meterpreter DLLs regardless which LPORT the attacker specifies when deploying the reverse shell.

Image: Meterpreter DLL extracted from DFIR Madness' case001.pcap

Packet Carving in NetworkMiner Professional

If you try to open anything other than a PCAP, PcapNG or ETL file in NetworkMiner Professional, then you'll be presented with an option to carve packets from the opened file as of this release.

The packet carver can extract packets from any structured or unstructured data, such as memory dumps and proprietary packet capture formats. NetworkMiner Pro's carver is a simplified version of the packet carving feature in CapLoader.

Loading the 1GB "memdump.mem" from Ali Hadi's Challenge #1 - Web Server Case into NetworkMiner Professional takes roughly five seconds, during which 612 packets get extracted.

Image: Information about network hosts carved from memory dump

In this scenario the memory was dumped on the 192.168.56.101 host, which NetworkMiner identifies as "WIN-L0ZZQ76PMUF". The carved packets also indicate that this computer had an outgoing TCP connection to 192.168.56.102, which appears to be a Linux machine called "kali". As you can see in the screenshot, the packets carved from the memory dump also reveal a great deal about other hosts on the network, such as the 192.168.56.1 host, which seems to be a Windows 7 machine called "IT104-00".

Offline Matching of JA3 and X.509 hashes

NetworkMiner 2.7.3 comes with a local copy of the SSL Certificate and JA3 Fingerprint Blacklists from the awesome abuse.ch project. JA3 hashes and extracted X.509 certificates are matched against these lists in order to see if they are associated with any piece of malware or botnet.

Here's one example showing the default Cobalt Strike certificate being identified as "AKBuilder C&C", since that's how it is listed in abuse.ch's SSL certificate database.

Image: Cobalt Strike's default certificate identified as "AKBuilder C&C"
PCAP: Cobalt Strike PCAP from malware-traffic-analysis.net

The port-independent protocol detection feature in NetworkMiner Professional additionally enables X.509 certificates to be extracted even from non-standard TLS ports, such as this certificate, which is identified as "BitRAT" with help of the abuse.ch certificate block-list.

Image: Both X.509 certificate and JA3 hash identified as BitRAT
PCAP: BitRAT PCAP from Joe Sandbox

The client's JA3 hash 8515076cbbca9dce33151b798f782456 is also associated with BitRAT according to abuse.ch.

DBSBL Lookup Detection

DNSBL services are used by servers handling incoming email to verify that the sender's IP address isn't a known SPAM sender and that it isn't from a network that shouldn't be sending emails.

But DNSBL services can also be used by malware and botnets, such as TrickBot and Emotet, to verify that the public IP of a victim is allowed to send emails and that it hasn't already been blacklisted for sending SPAM. We have therefore decided to add DNSBL lookups to the Host Details section in NetworkMiner 2.7.3.

Image: TrickBot victim checks if its public IP is blocked by DNSBL services
PCAP: TrickBot PCAP from malware-traffic-analysis.net

DNSBL lookups are also logged to the "Parameters" tab of NetworkMiner.

Image: NetworkMiner's Parameters tab with "DNSBL" filter
PCAP: TrickBot PCAP from malware-traffic-analysis.net

Additional Features and Updates

We'd also like to mention some additional new features, bug fixes and improvements that have been included in this new release.

• Support for HTTP CONNECT request method to extract artifacts like X.509 certificates and JA3 hashes from HTTPS traffic passing through a web proxy.
• Traffic to TCP ports 3000 and 8000 are now configured to be parsed as HTTP by default in order to handle WEBrick traffic.
• Improved extraction of SMTP credentials.
• JA3 hashes were previously incorrect for clients that supported more than one EC point format (RFC 8422). This has now been fixed.
• Support for SLL2 (Linux cooked capture v2) frames.
• Improved handling of concurrent GUI events, for example when poking around in the "Hosts" tab while loading a PCAP file or doing live sniffing.
• NetworkMiner's GUI no longer reloads between each PCAP file when multiple files are loaded at once.

New Features in NetworkMiner Professional

We have also added a few new features exclusively to NetworkMiner Professional, which is the commercial version of NetworkMiner. Apart from the packet carver feature, mentioned earlier in this blog post, we've also updated the collection of OSINT lookup services available in the GUI. One of the newly added services is Ryan Benson's unfurl, which picks apart URLs to reveal data that might have been encoded into a complex URL. The unfurl lookup can be found by right-clicking an URL in NetworkMiner Professional's "Browsers" tab and selecting the "Lookup URL" sub menu.

Other OSINT services that we've added are FileScan.IO and JoeSandbox lookups of extracted files. These lookups can be performed by right clicking a file in the "Files" tab and opening the sub-menu called "Lookup Hash".

Image: OSINT lookup of an EXE file extracted from network traffic

The command-line version of NetworkMiner Professional, NetworkMinerCLI, has also been updated to allow extracted information to be printed directly on standard output instead of logging everything to files. Here is an example showing this feature while running NetworkMinerCLI in Linux (with help of Mono):

The command above extracts files from a PCAP file, which contains traffic from a Windows PC infected with Qbot. The "-w" switch specifies the output directory for the files extracted from network traffic, and the "-X FileInfos" specifies that metadata for these files should be sent to STDOUT instead of being written to log files. The cut utility was used to show only the filename (column 5) and MD5 hash (column 9) of the file info output.

The MD5 hashes of the extracted files confirm that this is indeed a Qbot infection:

• 124207bc9c64e20e114bcaeabde12a4e (VT)
• ca7ef367c935182a40a95b9ad8b95f42 (VT)
• a9a8366fa6be54b45ca04192ca217b75 (VT)

NetworkMinerCLI previously printed some information about the parsing process to STDOUT. That output has now been moved to STDERR in order to provide the "-X [type]" output with exclusive access to STDOUT.

Credits

We'd like to thank Michael Taggart for noticing that NetworkMiner previously failed to parse HTTP traffic to ports 3000 and 8000.

Upgrading to Version 2.7.3

Users who have purchased NetworkMiner Professional can download a free update to version 2.7.3 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 Monday, 04 April 2022 06:52:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #carve​ #JA3​ #X.509​ #CobaltStrike​ #Cobalt Strike​ #TrickBot​ #Emotet​ #PIPI​ #Protocol Detection​ #OSINT​ #NetworkMinerCLI​

Carving Packets from Memory

Someone who says "We're gonna pull the packet captures out of the router" probably has no clue how to capture network traffic. In the Lindell case, statements like these were results of an elaborate hoax.

Nevertheless, such a statement doesn't have to be nonsense — if it comes from someone who knows how to dump the physical memory from the router. There are actually more packets available in the RAM of a router, or computer for that matter, than you might think.

The Forensic Challenge from DFRWS 2016 contains a memory dump from an SDN switch. If you drag-and-drop SDN.ram.raw from that challenge to CapLoader then you'll be asked if you wanna carve packets from the memory dump.

This packet carving feature is also available in the free trial version of CapLoader.

Clicking "Yes" in the dialogue brings up a configuration window. The default settings are okay in most cases.

After pressing "Start" CapLoader will start identifying packets in the memory dump from the SDN switch. The packets will be saved to a Pcap-NG file located in the %TEMP% directory, unless you specified a different output location in the config window.

You can download a copy of the Pcap-NG file that I generated with CapLoader 1.9.2 here:
https://media.netresec.com/pcap/SDN.ram.raw.pcapng (661 kB, 2959 packets)

Here's what it looks like when the carved packets have been loaded into NetworkMiner Professional.

As you can see, a great deal of information can be extracted about the hosts on this network just by examining the dumped memory from the SDN switch.

What about Bulk Extractor?

Simson Garfinkel's bulk_extractor can also extract packets from memory dumps. It was actually a research paper by Simson that inspired me to implement a packet carver in the first place.

There are a few significant differences between bulk_extractor and CapLoader with regards to packet carving though. One difference is that bulk_extractor identifies network packets by looking for Ethernet frames containing IPv4 packets, while CapLoader looks for IPv4 or IPv6 packets containing TCP or UDP packets. The output from bulk_extractor is usually quite similar to that of CapLoader, and so is the parsing speed. CapLoader was just slightly faster in our tests and carved about 3% more packets compared to bulk_extractor, these additional packets were primarily IPv6 packets and packets that weren't encapsulated by an Ethernet frame.

Where can I download memory dumps?

I posted a question on Twitter, asking the #DFIR community for their favorite publicly available memory dumps prior to writing this blog post, and I received lots of great answers. Thank you all for contributing! I have now compiled the following list of places from where you can download memory dumps:

• Memory Images from the Stolen Szechuan Sauce case by James Smith
• Digital Corpora 2018 Lone Wolf Scenario by Thomas Moore
• Digital Corpora 2009 M57 Patents Scenario by Naval Postgraduate School
• DFRWS 2005 Challenge
• DFRWS 2008 Challenge
• DFRWS 2016 Challenge (SDN switch)
• CTF-styled memory forensic challenges by Abhiram Kumar
• Mini Memory CTF contest from 2020 by 13Cubed
• Web Server Case by Ali Hadi
• Locky Ransomware infection by Jiří Vinopal
• Memory images from the Art of Memory Forensics (book) by the Volatility Team
• Memory Forensic challenges on CyberDefenders
• GrrCON 2015 CTF by Wyatt Roersma
• GrrCON 2017 Memory Dumps by Wyatt Roersma
• GrrCON 2019 CTF by Wyatt Roersma

For a more detailed blog post on CapLoader's packet carving functionality, please see our Carving Network Packets from Memory Dump Files blog post from 2014.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Tuesday, 31 August 2021 15:10:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #Forensics​ #PCAP​ #Pcap-NG​ #PcapNG​ #DFIR​ #carve​ #dump​ #CapLoader​ #DFRWS​