How to Install NetworkMiner in Linux

This guide shows how to install the latest version of NetworkMiner in Linux. To install an older NetworkMiner release, prior to version 3.0, please see our legacy NetworkMiner in Linux guide.

STEP 1: Install Mono and GTK2

Mono is an open source cross-platform implementation of the .NET framework, it is needed to run NetworkMiner non-Windows machines. GTK2 is not required, but it provides a more consistent look to the user interface.

Ubuntu / Linux Mint / Kali Linux / Raspberry Pi OS:

Fedora:

AlmaLinux / RHEL:

Arch Linux:

STEP 2: Install NetworkMiner

STEP 3: Run NetworkMiner

Follow these steps to analyze live network traffic:

• Click File, Receive PCAP over IP [Ctrl+R]
• Click Start Receiving and note the listen TCP port (default is 57012)

Then run this command to sniff network traffic and send a real-time stream of captured packets to NetworkMiner:

Change 57012 in the command above if NetworkMiner is listening on a different TCP port.

This PCAP-over-IP technique can also be used to read a real-time packet stream from a remote device. It is also possible to sniff packets from Mikrotik routers by clicking File, Receive TZSP Stream.

STEP 4 (optional): Create Shortcut Command

NetworkMiner can now be started like this:

Linux Distros with NetworkMiner

NetworkMiner comes pre-packaged on some Linux distributions, such as REMnux, Security Onion Desktop, CSI Linux and BlackArch.

Static Download Link

The https://www.netresec.com/?download=NetworkMiner download link always delivers the latest release of NetworkMiner. If you prefer a static link, that points to a specific version of NetworkMiner, then please use this one: https://download.netresec.com/networkminer/NetworkMiner_3-0.zip

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Thursday, 10 April 2025 07:30:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #Linux​ #Ubuntu​ #Kali​

NetworkMiner 3.0 Released

I am very proud to announce the release of NetworkMiner 3.0 today!

This version brings several new protocols as well as user interface improvements to NetworkMiner. We have also made significant changes under the hood, such as altering the default location to where NetworkMiner extracts files from network traffic.

Some of the major changes in this new release are:

• New protocols: QUIC, CIP (EtherNet/IP), UMAS and Remcos RAT.
• Improved passive OS fingerprinting.
• Additional filtering capabilities.
• User interface adapted for Linux.

Filtering of Displayed Artefacts

A tooltip text is temporarily displayed when a filter is activated. The tooltip shows the number of visible items after the filter is applied. This tooltip can also be shown at a later point by hovering with the mouse over the filter text or the Apply button.

Right-clicking on an item or artefact in any of NetworkMiner’s tabs brings up a context menu. We’ve now added an “Apply as Filter” option to this context menu, which can be used to let NetworkMiner automatically generate a filter based on the clicked item. This feature saves time for the analyst and reduces risk of misspellings.

We have also added a keyword filter to the Credentials tab and updated the image filename filter to ignore case.

Other User Interface Improvements

The File Details window, which shows metadata and contents of an extracted file, now has a “Show as” menu that can be used to preview the contents of a file as ASCII, Hex, Unicode or UTF-8.

This file details window can now also be accessed directly from the Images tab by right-clicking on a thumbnail of an extracted image.

NetworkMiner 3.0 extracts Maximum Segment Size (MSS) values from TCP handshakes and show them under Host Details for each respective IP address. This value can help with determining if a host is behind a VPN. An MSS value below 1400 indicates that the traffic might have passed through some form of overlay network, such as a tunnel or VPN.

Other indicators that can help identify VPN and tunnelled traffic is IP TTL and latency, which NetworkMiner already extracts.

The screenshot above also shows that the operating system was identified as Windows, both with help of p0f as well as based on the client’s web browser user-agent. The user-agent based OS fingerprinting is a new feature that we added in NetworkMiner 3.0. This is a nice complement to the TCP and DHCP based OS fingerprinting features that NetworkMiner already performs. We’ve configured this feature to also detect operating systems of user-agent strings sent over UPnP/SSDP.

The text on a few of NetworkMiner’s buttons were not visible on some Linux distros, depending on how much button padding the respective window manager and theme added. Button sizes have therefore been increased in this release to reduce the risk of text not being visible when NetworkMiner is run in Linux.

New Protocol: QUIC

NetworkMiner 3.0 parses initial packets from the QUIC protocol (RFC 9000), which is the UDP based protocol used to transport HTTP/3. The QUIC parser allows NetworkMiner to extract TLS handshakes from UDP 443 traffic, from which the server’s hostname can be read if the client uses the SNI extension. The extracted TLS handshakes from QUIC are also used to generate JA3 and JA4 fingerprints for clients.

New Protocol: CIP and EtherNet/IP

We added parsers for the industrial control system protocols CIP and EtherNet/IP. The implementation does not cover all of the CIP and EtherNet/IP specifications, instead we focused on extracting device information, such as product vendor, product name, bulletin name, serial number and hostname. Such device information is crucial when performing passive asset identification of PLC’s and other industrial devices on OT/ICS networks, such as in factories and power plants. The CIP parser also supports extraction of tag data from Rockwell's proprietary version of CIP.

New Protocol: UMAS

A parser for the industrial control system protocol Modbus/TCP was added to NetworkMiner 2.0 back in 2016. In today’s 3.0 release we’ve enhanced the Modbus implementation to also parse out commands from Schneider Electric's proprietary UMAS protocol, which runs on top of Modbus by using the special function code 90 (0x5a). Our implementation unfortunately doesn’t have full coverage of UMAS, since we don’t have a protocol specification for this proprietary protocol. Nevertheless, our implementation recognizes 40 different UMAS commands (aka UMAS function codes) and can extract fields and parameters from at least 6 of them. The parsed UMAS commands can be viewed in NetworkMiner’s Parameters tab.

New Protocol: REMCOS C2

We started adding parsers for proprietary malicious Command-and-Control (C2) protocols, like StealC, njRAT, BackConnect and RMS, to NetworkMiner a couple of years ago. These malware C2 and backdoor protocol parsers enable security researchers to study what actions threat actors perform when accessing victim computers or honeypot systems.

We’re continuing on our endeavour of creating parsers for malicious protocol by adding support for the Remcos RAT C2 protocol to NetworkMiner 3.0.

Naturally, NetworkMiner’s Remcos parser can’t extract the C2 comms if Remcos uses TLS. Another limitation is that the free version of NetworkMiner is only able to parse Remcos traffic when the C2 server is running on a standard port like TCP 2404. The port-independent-protocol-identification feature in the Professional edition of NetworkMiner, however, identifies and parses Remcos traffic regardless of which port the C2 server listens on (the C2 server in the screenshot above was running on TCP port 1961).

Improved Protocol Parsers

We have also improved several of NetworkMiner’s existing protocol parsers. NetworkMiner’s parser for the trojan/backdoor njRAT (Bladabindi) protocol has, for example, been extended to reassemble full desktop screenshots from njRAT’s Remote Desktop feature.

NetworkMiner’s parser for Modbus has also been extended to support additional function codes and the NTLMSSP parser (for SMB/SMB2) is now better at extracting hostnames to NetworkMiner’s Hosts tab.

Bugs Fixes

A bug in NetworkMiner’s timestamp comparison code previously caused items to be sorted incorrectly when the Timestamp column header was clicked. This bug has now been fixed. We have also fixed a bug relating to extraction of parameters sent in JSON encoded HTTP POST requests.

Breaking Changes

Some of the changes introduced in the 3.0 release might require some users to adapt their workflow. One such change is that the default output path for extracted files and captured packets has changed from NetworkMiner’s directory to %LocalAppData%\NetworkMiner\ in Windows and ~/.local/share/NetworkMiner/ in Linux. This means that you no longer need to add write permissions to the NetworkMiner application directory or subdirectories thereof, since NetworkMiner no longer creates or modifies files there.

Another breaking change is that we have removed the Anomalies tab from the user interface. Windows users can still see alerts by starting NetworkMiner with --filelog, while Linux can use --debug to print debug, warning and error messages to stderr. Use --loglevel warning to suppress info and debug messages.

A change that only affects users of NetworkMiner Professional is that the command line tool NetworkMinerCLI now requires a Corporate License. If you currently have a single-user license, then you will still be able to use the command line tool in your 2.x version of NetworkMiner Professional, but not in the new 3.0 release.

NetworkMiner Professional

There are several improvements in the 3.0 release that only affect users of NetworkMiner Professional. One noteworthy update is that the Pro release has become significantly faster, especially for capture files containing many short TCP sessions. NetworkMiner Professional now saves around two milliseconds in parsing time for every TCP session. This might not sound as much, but it actually makes a huge difference when parsing capture files containing thousands of small TCP sessions.

NetworkMiner’s support for the TLS fingerprinting method JA4 has also been extended even further in the 3.0 release. NetworkMiner Professional now leverages FoxIO’s JA4 database to identify operating systems as well as applications based on client TLS handshake packets.

Other improvement of NetworkMiner Professional include:

• Network operator and AS number displayed on Hosts tab.
• File OSINT lookup includes Censys body_hash lookups.
• IP and domain OSINT lookups added to NetworkMiner’s DNS tab.
• PcapNG packet comments displayed in the Parameters tab.

Upgrading to Version 3.0

Users who have purchased NetworkMiner Professional can download version 3.0 from our customer portal, or use the “Check for Updates” feature from NetworkMiner's Help menu. Those who instead prefer to use the free and open source version can grab the latest release of NetworkMiner from the official NetworkMiner page.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Friday, 04 April 2025 10:53:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #JA3​ #JA4​ #njRAT​

Remote Sniffing from Mikrotik Routers

One of the new features in NetworkMiner 2.9 is a TZSP streaming server. It is designed to read a real-time stream of sniffed packets from Mikrotik routers. This method for remote sniffing can be used to capture packets regardless if NetworkMiner is running in Windows or Linux.

How to Sniff Packets with TZSP

Open a console or terminal on the Mikrotik router and run “/tool sniffer print” to see the current settings. Then run the following commands to configure the sniffer:

• /tool sniffer
• set streaming-enabled=yes
• set streaming-server=10.1.2.3:37008
• set filter-stream=yes

Replace 10.1.2.3 with the IP address of the computer running NetworkMiner

It is also possible to activate the sniffer from the RouterOS WebFig interface.

• Expand the “Tools” section
• Click “Packet Sniffer”
• Check “Streaming Enabled”
• Enter IP of computer running NetworkMiner in Server
• Enter 37008 as Port
• Check “Filter Stream”
• Click the “Apply” button at the top

The “filter-stream” setting prevents the sniffer from capturing packets that are sent to the streaming-server (i.e. NetworkMiner). This setting must be enabled to avoid a snowball effect, where copies of previously captured packets get sniffed and re-transmitted to the streaming-server.

The next step is to open the TZSP window in NetworkMiner, which you’ll find under “File, Receive TZSP Stream”.

Click “Start” in NetworkMiner’s TZSP window, so that it listens for an incoming TZSP stream on UDP port 57008. Go back to the Mikrotik router, where you start the sniffer with “/tool sniffer start” or by clicking the “Start” button in the WebFig. You should now see the Frames counter increasing in NetworkMiner's TZSP window. You’ll probably also notice that artifacts get added to the main NetworkMiner window in the background as more packets are received.

Close the sniffer by running “/tool sniffer stop” or clicking the “Stop” button in WebFig, then click “Stop” in NetworkMiner. You can now close NetworkMiner’s TZSP window to view the artifacts that NeworkMiner has extracted from the captured traffic.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Thursday, 30 May 2024 13:05:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #TZSP​ #NetworkMiner​ #sniffer​

NetworkMiner 2.9 Released

NetworkMiner 2.9 brings several new and improved features to help analysts make sense of network traffic from malware, criminals and industrial control systems. Highlights from this new version include:

• TZSP support
• StealC extractor
• Improved Modbus parser
• JA4 support
• GTP decapsulation

Malware Traffic Artifact Extraction

NetworkMiner is a popular tool for extracting artifacts from malware traffic. Such artifacts can be downloaded malware modules, exfiltrated documents and sometimes even screenshots of the infected computer.

Parsers for njRAT and BackConnect (à la IcedID, QakBot and Bazar) traffic was previously added to NetworkMiner. In this release NetworkMiner also gets a parser for StealC, which has quickly become one of the most popular information stealers on Russian-speaking underground forums. The new NetworkMiner 2.9 release extracts screenshots and files that SteakC exfiltrates from the infected machine.

The examples shown below were created by loading a pcap file with StealC traffic from Triage sandbox into NetworkMiner 2.9. NetworkMiner was run in Linux to minimize the risk of accidentally infecting the analysis environment.

Image: Reassembled system info and documents exfiltrated by StealC to 185.172.128.151

Image: Reassembled screenshot of victim’s desktop sent to StealC C2 server

NetworkMiner’s VNC and BackConnect VNC parser has also been improved in this release. NetworkMiner’s keylog extraction from VNC now supports lots of keyboard layouts, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Kana, Korean and Thai. The handling of VNC color profiles has also been improved to convey colors more correctly in screenshots from reassembled VNC and BackConnect VNC traffic. I’d like to thank Brad Duncan and Maxime Thiebaut for their valuable input on this matter!

Another remote management tool that often is misused by hackers and criminals is Remote Manipulator System (RMS) from TektonIT. According to Cyberint’s report Legit remote admin tools turn into threat actors’ tools there are lots of Russian forum posts and even YouTube tutorials showing how to include legitimate RMS components in malware. NetworkMiner now parses RMS’s session setup, which includes information about the client computer as well as the RMS product and version. The screenshot below was created by loading a pcap file from when 3_Рахунок.pdf.exe was executed in JoeSandbox.

Image: Information extracted from RMS traffic

The country_code number (here 223) also gets converted to a human-readable country (Switzerland) by NetworkMiner, but this country name info is only displayed in the Host Details of the client.

ICS / SCADA

NetworkMiner has supported Modbus/TCP since 2016 (when NetworkMiner 2.0 was released). This Modbus parser has now been updated to display Modbus addresses using the Modicon convention, which explicitly specifies the register type while also signalling to the user that the displayed addresses are one-indexed.

The register types are displayed in parenthesis and should be interpreted as follows:

• (0)nnnn = Coil
• (1)nnnn = Discrete input
• (3)nnnn = Input register
• (4)nnnn = Holding register

NetworkMiner now also reads Modbus Device Identification messages and displays the reported device info in Host Details. This feature is very handy if you’re building an asset inventory through passive asset discovery (i.e. passively monitoring traffic to identify devices).

NetworkMiner 2.9 also supports asset identification for ICS networks that use COTP based protocols, such as Siemens S7 protocol or IEC 61850 MMS, by parsing COTP connection request messages. The identified COTP TSAP names are displayed under Host Details.

Image: NetworkMiner showing a WinCC client and a Siemens SIMATIC device

User Interface Improvements

TLS handshake fingerprinting with JA3 was added to NetworkMiner in 2019, but last year John Althouse announced the new JA4+ fingerprint methods. In short JA4+ is a suite of methods designed to fingerprint implementations of a specific set of protocols, including TLS, HTTP and SSH. Most of the fingerprinting methods in the JA4+ suite are patent pending except for the TLS client fingerprinting method JA4, which is an improved version of JA3. NetworkMiner now generates both JA3 and JA4 fingerprints for TLS handshakes. The results from the TLS fingerprinting can be seen in the Parameters tab as well as Host Details. In the example below we’ve loaded TLS traffic to port 8533 on 91.92.251.26 from a Remcos sample on ANY.RUN into NetworkMiner Professional (the free NetworkMiner edition doesn’t parse TLS traffic to non-standard ports).

Image: JA4 hash t13i010400_0f2cb44170f4_5c4c70b73fa0 for Remcos C2 traffic

NetworkMiner has also been improved to extract even more information from HTTP traffic, such as JSON formatted parameters and telemetry data sent to Microsoft by their Device Metadata Retrieval Client (DMRC). We have also improved the DNS extraction, both with regards to DNS TXT labels and Additional Resource Records.

The previous Remcos screenshot displays a latency measurement (0.0935 ms), which is another new feature in this release. This latency value is an estimation of the average timespan from when the host sends a packet until it gets captured by the sniffer. NetworkMiner’s hosts list can be sorted based on the Latency value, whereby local computers and network devices are shown at the top of the list. Another way to achieve similar results is to instead sort the hosts based on “Router Hops Distance”.

NetworkMiner’s user interface has also been improved to make it easier to copy text from the Hosts and Parameters tabs with Ctrl+C or by right-clicking and selecting “Copy …”. The export-to-file function in NetworkMiner Professional now additionally includes data from the Keywords tab.

TZSP Sniffing and Decapsulation

Routers from Mikrotik have a feature called TZSP (short for TaZmen sniffer Protocol), which encapsulates captured traffic into TZSP packets and then transmits them to a streaming server. This feature is similar to PCAP-over-IP and ERSPAN, except TZSP transports the sniffed packets over UDP instead of TCP or GRE.

NetworkMiner now includes a TZSP streaming server, which can receive TZSP encapsulated traffic over a UDP socket. Click “File, Receive TZSP Stream”, select a port (default is 37008) and click “Start” to receive a real-time stream of captured packets from a Mikrotik router. We’ve also added support for TZSP link layer type (DLT_TZSP) pcap files as well as decapsulation of TZSP packets to UDP port 37008. I’d like to thank Jarmo Lahtiranta for proposing this feature!

Speaking of decapsulation – we’ve added a GTP-U parser, which enables NetworkMiner to analyze GPRS traffic from GSM, UMTS, LTE and 5G networks that is transmitted inside a GTP tunnel.

Upgrading to Version 2.9

Users who have purchased NetworkMiner Professional can download version 2.9 from our customer portal, or use the “Check for Updates” feature from NetworkMiner's Help menu. 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, 27 May 2024 09:50:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #TZSP​ #Modbus​ #JA4​ #BackConnect​ #VNC​ #JSON​

Forensic Timeline of an IcedID Infection

The BackConnect and VNC parsers that were added to NetworkMiner 2.8.1 provide a unique possibility to trace the steps of an attacker with help of captured network traffic from a hacked computer.

In this blog post I use the free and open source version of NetworkMiner to see how GzipLoader downloads IcedID, after which the attacker deploys BackConnect VNC to purchase an iPhone 14 with a stolen credit card and then drops Cobalt Strike on the victim PC.

The analyzed pcap is 2022-10-31-IcedID-with-DarkVNC-and-Cobalt-Strike-full-pcap-raw.pcap from Brad Duncan's malware-traffic-analysis.net blog.

Safety First

I ran NetworkMiner in a Windows Sandbox when analyzing this PCAP file to avoid accidentally infecting my computer with any of the malicious artifacts that NetworkMiner extracts from the network traffic.

Another safe way to analyze Windows malware is to run NetworkMiner in Linux or macOS.

14:47 GzipLoader

This infection starts with GzipLoader (aka “IcedID Downloader”) reaching out to its C2 server on vgiragdoffy[.]com (67.205.184.237:80) to download IcedID.

The “_gat” cookie value in frame number 6 tells us that the victim machine is running a Windows 10 build 19045 (aka 22H2). The long “_u” value contains the victim’s username and hostname in hexadecimal representation and the “__io” value is the logged in user’s SID. NetworkMiner decodes these values from the GzipLoader request and displays them in the Hosts tab.

For more info about the GzipLoader cookie, see IcedID PhotoLoader evolution by Jason Reaves and the eSentire blog post on Gootloader and IcedID.

The response for this GzipLoader request is a 550 kB file (MD5 700c602086590b05dde8df57933c7e68) with a fake gzip header. This file actually contains the IcedID DLL (Odwikp.dll) and license.dat files.

14:47 IcedID

The banking trojan IcedID (aka BokBot) gets launched at 14:47:29 UTC (frame 641) after which it connects to these four IcedID servers used for payload delivery and C2:

• ringashopsu[.]com = 137.184.208.116
• sainforgromset[.]com = 138.68.255.102
• yeloypod[.]hair = 94.140.114.103
• airsaintol[.]beauty = 66.63.168.75

These four IcedID servers all run TLS servers with self signed certificates issued for "localhost" and doing TLS handshakes with JA3S hash ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc. Both these properties can be used as filters in NetworkMiner's Hosts tab to only display the IcedID C2 servers.

14:59 BackConnect and Keyhole VNC

Shortly after the IcedID C2 traffic has been started the IcedID bot also initiates BackConnect C2 connections to 137.74.104.108 on TCP port 8080 (frame 4505 at 14:59:14 UTC).

The BackConnect C2 server tells the bot to sleep for 60 seconds two times before launching a reverse VNC session with command 0x11 (frame 4530 at 15:01.09 UTC).

15:06 Apple Store

The keylog of the attacker above reveals that the attacker is typing “iphone 14 apple store buy”. The VNC graphics that NetworkMiner extracted from the PCAP file additionally reveal that this was a Google search query typed into an Edge browser.

15:10 Credit Card payment

The attacker proceeds to the Apple Store, puts a black iPhone 14 Plus for $987.99 into the shopping cart, enters a delivery address in West Hartford (US) and then inputs credit card details for the payment.

Luckily, the transaction was denied by Apple Store.

15:12 Reverse Shell

After having failed to buy an iPhone through the hacked computer the attacker instead deploys three reverse shell sessions using the BackConnect C2 channel.

These three commands are issued in the first reverse shell session:

In the second shell session the attacker first runs these three commands:

...and then starts a file manager session through the BackConnect C2 channel.

15:40 Deploy Cobalt Strike

The BackConnect file manager is used to upload a Cobalt Strike binary called P2.dll to "C:\ProgramData\" on the victim computer in frame 144535.

The uploaded P2.dll is then executed by running this command in the reverse shell session (frame 144707):

NetworkMiner extracts this uploaded DLL from the BackConnect network traffic.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the MD5 hash of P2.dll is cc69a31a067b62dda5f2076f8ee335e1. This file is flagged as malicious by most AV vendors (P2.dll on VT). However, none of them label it as Cobalt Strike. Luckily I was able to use Triage's malware config extractor to verify that this was indeed Cobalt Strike (P2.dll on tria.ge). Triage also revealed that the CobaltStrike C2 URL was
clouditsoft[.]com:8008/static-directory/mg.jpg

After the DLL gets executed the victim PC establishes Cobalt Strike beacon C2 connections to clouditsoft[.]com on port 8008 (frame 144715).

15:41 MOAR COBALT STRIKE

The BackConnect Reverse Shell log in NetworkMiner's Parameters tab shows that the attacker also attempted to download Cobalt Strike using PowerShell at 15:41:59 UTC (frame 145176) with this command:

IOC List

• IP:port 67.205.184.237:80 (GzipLoader)
• DNS vgiragdoffy[.]com (GzipLoader)
• MD5 700c602086590b05dde8df57933c7e68 (Fake gzip file)
• MD5 f57ab2e5e5720572d5eb19010ec8dcb4 (IcedID Odwikp.dll from fake gzip)
• MD5 57a9d9acb389bd74a7423a16ef81ac18 (IcedID license.dat from fake gzip)
• DNS ringashopsu[.]com (IcedID C2)
• DNS sainforgromset[.]com (IcedID C2)
• DNS yeloypod[.]hair (IcedID C2)
• DNS airsaintol[.]beauty (IcedID C2)
• IP:port 137.184.208.116:443 (IcedID C2)
• IP:port 138.68.255.102:443(IcedID C2)
• IP:port 94.140.114.103:443 (IcedID C2)
• IP:port 66.63.168.7:443 (IcedID C2)
• JA3S hash ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc (IcedID C2)
• IP:port 137.74.104.108:8080 (IcedID BackConnect C2)
• MD5 cc69a31a067b62dda5f2076f8ee335e1 (CobaltStrike P2.dll)
• DNS clouditsoft[.]com (CobaltStrike C2)
• IP:port 198.44.140.67:8008 (CobaltStrike C2)

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Thursday, 12 October 2023 13:23:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #IcedID​ #GzipLoader​ #BackConnect​ #VNC​ #CobaltStrike​ #Cobalt Strike​ #Windows Sandbox​ #ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc​ #JA3S​

NetworkMiner 2.8.1 Released

I am happy to announce the release of NetworkMiner 2.8.1 today!

This new release brings a VNC parser to NetworkMiner, so that screenshots, keystrokes and clipboard data can be extracted from unencrypted VNC traffic. NetworkMiner 2.8.1 additionally includes parsers for command-and-control (C2) protocols used by njRAT, IcedID, QakBot and Bazar. We have also added extraction of files sent using a HTTP PUT request, which is the rare cousin to the more common POST request. NetworkMiner’s Images tab has also been updated to enable filtering based on filename or pixel count.

VNC

NetworkMiner now supports the remote framebuffer (RFB) protocol (RFC 6143), which is the underlying protocol used in VNC software. VNC is used to remotely control another computer with help of a real-time video feed of the remote computer’s screen and the ability to control the remote desktop using a mouse and keyboard.

NetworkMiner reassembles the desktop graphics that get transferred between a VNC client and server to build a local representation of the remote desktop. Screenshots of that desktop then get extracted to disk by NetworkMiner as it gets updated. These desktop screenshots can be viewed in NetworkMiner’s Images tab. NetworkMiner also extracts keystrokes and clipboard data from the VNC traffic and displays them in the Parameters tab.

Limitations in VNC Extraction

Essential configuration of the VNC session is set up in the beginning of each TCP session. NetworkMiner therefore requires analyzed traffic to include this initial setup in order to successfully extract graphics from a VNC session.

Only traffic to TCP ports 5900 and 5901 will be parsed as VNC traffic by the free version of NetworkMiner. Our commercial tool NetworkMiner Professional has the ability to identify VNC traffic regardless of port number, but the free version will fail to extract screenshots from VNC traffic running on non-standard ports.

NetworkMiner’s VNC implementation is currently at an early stage, which is why it might fail to extract screenshots or other data from VNC sessions. If you encounter VNC traffic that NetworkMiner fails to parse, then we’d be very grateful if you would contact us and let us know so that we can improve NetworkMiner’s VNC extraction in future releases.

BackConnect

I have previously outlined the BackConnect protocol used by IcedID, QakBot as well as Bazar. This BackConnect protocol is used by botnet operators to remotely control a victim computer using a form of remote access trojan (RAT). This BackConnect protocol supports features such as tunneling network traffic through the victim’s computer, uploading files and the ability to control the victim’s computer using VNC.

NetworkMiner now has a parser for this BackConnect protocol, which allows analysts to see screenshots, keystrokes and file uploads from when the attacker interacts with the hacked computer. As you might have guessed, NetworkMiner’s VNC parser is reused in order to also parse reverse VNC traffic from BackConnect sessions.

I would like to thank Maxime Thiebaut for releasing his PCAPeek tool, which also reassembles reverse VNC traffic from BackConnect traffic. Maxime’s tool proved that it was possible to extract graphics from this C2 traffic, which motivated me to create a BackConnect VNC parser for NetworkMiner.

BackConnect VNC Replay

To demonstrate NetworkMiner’s reverse VNC reassembly I’d like to use the file “2023-07-26-IcedID-with-Keyhole-VNC-traffic.pcap” from Brad Duncan’s fantastic malware-traffic-analysis.net website. In this traffic the IcedID BackConnect C2 server listens to TCP port 443 on 165.232.175.216.

The screenshot thumbnails from the BackConnect VNC traffic shows that the attacker opens up the Amazon website on the victim’s computer. A copy of the full 1920x1152 screenshot, which NetworkMiner extracted from the VNC traffic, can be viewed here: VNC_73F81C83_230726142247.jpg

The parameters tab in NetworkMiner additionally confirms that the attacker manually typed “amazon.com” into the hacked computer’s web browser.

Limitations in BackConnect Parser

The BackConnect implementation in NetworkMiner 2.8.1 is pretty well tested and even supports the new “encrypted” version of BackConnect that IcedID has been deploying lately (we call it “BackConnect XOR”). NetworkMiner can parse the BackConnect C2 traffic as well as the traffic from modules for reverse VNC, reverse SOCKS, reverse shell and the file manager.

Unfortunately the BackConnect traffic typically runs on TCP ports like 443 or 8080, which are normally used for TLS or web proxies. The free open source version of NetworkMiner normally attempts to interpret traffic to port 443 as TLS and 8080 as HTTP proxy, even though it might be BackConnect. A hardcoded list of 32 verified BackConnect C2 servers, such as 165.232.175.216:443, 137.184.172.23:443 and 185.99.132.16:8080, has therefore been added to NetworkMiner’s source code. This enables NetworkMiner to interpret traffic to those IP:port combinations as BackConnect. Our commercial tool NetworkMiner Professional can identify protocols without relying on the port number though, this enables the “Pro” version to also parse BackConnect traffic to C2 servers that aren’t among the 32 hard coded ones in the source code.

njRAT

njRAT is an old, yet still very popular remote access trojan (RAT). It has been around for at least 10 years (since 2013) and can be used to do things like:

• Steal credentials
• Take screenshots of the desktop
• Start the camera
• Record audio with the microphone
• Start a reverse shell
• Upload or download files
• Execute a file or module
• Capture keystrokes with a keylogger
• Create, read or delete registry keys
• Run a command

I have been teaching students in my network forensics classes how to manually parse njRAT traffic since 2015, but from now on I’ll instead be able to tell them to load the njRAT traffic into NetworkMiner to see what the attacker did on the victim’s computer.

The NetworkMiner parameters and victim PC screenshot above were extracted from 2015-04-22_capture-win4.pcap in StratosphereIPS’ dataset CTU-Malware-Capture-Botnet-120-1. The victim PC desktop screenshot actually came out as a 51x4900 pixel image in NetworkMiner 2.8.1, so I had to manually reorganize the tiles to a 510x490 image instead. I’m planning to add an automatic retiling feature to NetworkMiner to avoid having to do this manually in the future.

Limitations in njRAT Parser

njRAT comes in many different versions, forks and flavors and the protocol even has a field delimiter sequence that can be customized for each njRAT backdoor. I can therefore not guarantee that NetworkMiner will be able to parse traffic from all njRAT sessions, but so far I’ve seen very good results – even when custom field delimiters are being used.

Nevertheless, this trojan has an abundance of features but only the most commonly used ones are implemented in NetworkMiner. More specifically NetworkMiner primarily supports extraction of screenshots, credentials, keylog data, file uploads and downloads. NetworkMiner also extracts exfiltrated metadata about the victim machine and bot, such as the hostname, operating system, logged in user, bot ID, botnet, njRAT version and njRAT install date.

Also, as previously mentioned, NetworkMiner doesn’t yet stitch together tiles of desktop screenshots correctly.

Another limitation is that an njRAT C2 server can be deployed on any TCP port, which might prevent the free version from interpreting the C2 traffic as njRAT. The free version of NetworkMiner currently tries to parse traffic to ports like 1177, 5050, 5552 and a few others as njRAT, while NetworkMiner Professional will automatically recognize the njRAT protocol regardless which port it runs on.

Bug Fixes

We’ve added support for SIP keepalive messages (RFC 5626) in NetworkMiner 2.8.1. NetworkMiner Professional would previously fail to extract VoIP calls, or text messages sent through SIP, if a keepalive packet was sent in the session prior to the call or text message. We have also fixed a bug in NetworkMiner’s CapWap parser.

Upgrading to Version 2.8.1

Users who have purchased NetworkMiner Professional can download a free update to version 2.8.1 from our customer portal, or use the “Check for Updates” feature from NetworkMiner's Help menu. 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, 02 October 2023 11:13:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #NetworkMiner​ #VNC​ #BackConnect​ #IcedID​ #njRAT​

EvilExtractor Network Forensics

I analyzed a PCAP file from a sandbox execution of the Evil Extractor stealer malware earlier today. This stealer collects credentials and files of interest from the victim’s computer and exfiltrates them to an FTP server. It is designed to autonomously collect and exfiltrate data rather than receiving commands from an operator through a command-and-control channel. The EvilExtractor creators market this feature as a “golden bullet”.

Real hackers don’t use reverse shells right? If you have only one bullet, would you waste with reverse shell? Try Evil Extractor to have golden bullet.

I downloaded the Evil Extractor capture file from Triage to a Windows Sandbox environment, to avoid accidentally infecting my computer when extracting artifacts from the PCAP. I then opened it up in the free version of NetworkMiner.

NetworkMiner shows that after checking its public IP on ipinfo.io EvilExtractor makes an unencrypted HTTP connection to a web server on 193.42.33.232 to download KK2023.zip. This zip archive contains a file called “Lst.exe” which is used to steal browser data, cookies and credentials according to Fortinet.

Twenty seconds later an FTP connection is established to 89.116.53.55 on TCP port 21. The username and password used to authenticate to the FTP server was “u999382941” and “Test1234”.

On the FTP server EvilExtractor creates a directory named after the country and hostname of the victim's PC, such as “(Sweden)DESKTOP-VV03LJ”, in which it creates the following three sub directories:

• 1-Password-Cookies
• 2-Credentials
• 3-Files

After uploading browser cookies, browser history and cached passwords from Chrome, Firefox and Edge to the “1-Password-Cookies” directory EvilExtractor sends a file called “Credentials.txt” to the “2-Credentials” directory. The contents of this text file looks something like this:

Public IP: [redacted]
Location: [lat],[long]
Computer Name: [redacted]
Username: Admin
RAM: 4 GB
OS Name: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
OS Bit: 64-bit
Keyboard Language: en-US
GPU: [redacted]
CPU: Intel [redacted]
MAC Address: [redacted]
Extracted WIFI: [redacted]

The stealer also exfiltrates files with mpeg, docx, jpeg, pptx, zip, avi and rar extensions from the victim PC to the “3-Files” directory on the FTP server. The directory structure of the victim’s PC is maintained on the FTP server, so that files from the victim's desktop end up in a folder called “Desktop” on the FTP server.

The stealer later downloaded a keylogger module (Confirm.zip) and a webcam module (MnMs.zip), but no additional data was exfiltrated from this particular victim PC after that point.

IOC List

• Web server: 193.42.33.232:80
• FTP server: 89.116.53.55:21
• EvilExtractor: 9650ac3a9de8d51fddab092c7956bdae
• KK2023.zip: f07b919ff71fb33ee0f77e9e02c5445b
• Lst.exe: 163d4e2d75f8ce6c838bab888bf9629c
• Confirm.zip: 30532a6121cb33afc04eea2b8dcea461
• Confirm.exe: 0c18c4669e7ca7e4d21974ddcd24fdca
• MnMs.zip: bda0bda512d3e2a81fc9e4cf393091eb
• MnMs.exe: fb970c4367609860c2e5b17737a9f460

Users with an account on Triage can download the analyzed PCAP file from here: https://tria.ge/230424-vv9wvsfb2v/behavioral2

Update 2023-04-27

Jane tweeted a link to an execution of this same sample on ANY.RUN. This execution showed very similar results as the one on Triage, but with an interesting twist. Not only did the ANY.RUN execution exfiltrate images and documents from the Desktop and Downloads folders, it also exfiltrated “vv9wvsfb2v_pw_infected.zip”, which contained the EvilExtractor EXE file that was being run!

The PCAP from the ANY.RUN execution can be downloaded from here: https://app.any.run/tasks/43a11a79-4d1f-406c-86d7-158efb5ede01/

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Wednesday, 26 April 2023 08:50:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #FTP​ #NetworkMiner​ #Sandbox​ #Triage​ #ANY.RUN​

QakBot C2 Traffic

In this video I analyze network traffic from a QakBot (QBot) infection in order to identify the Command-and-Control (C2) traffic. The analyzed PCAP file is from malware-traffic-analysis.net.

IOC List

• C2 IP and port: 80.47.61.240:2222
• C2 IP and port: 185.80.53.210:443
• QakBot proxy IP and port: 23.111.114.52:65400
• JA3: 72a589da586844d7f0818ce684948eea
• JA3S: ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc
• JA3S: fd4bc6cea4877646ccd62f0792ec0b62
• meieou.info X.509 cert hash: 9de2a1c39fbe1952221c4b78b8d21dc3afe53a3e
• meieou.info X.509 cert Subject OU: Hoahud Duhcuv Dampvafrog
• meieou.info X.509 cert Issuer O: Qdf Wah Uotvzke LLC.
• gifts.com X.509 cert hash: 0c7a37f55a0b0961c96412562dd0cf0b0b867d37
• HTML Body Hash: 22e5446e82b3e46da34b5ebce6de5751664fb867
• HTML Title: Welcome to CentOS

Links

• QakBot PCAP download (malware-traffic-analysis.net)
• 80.47.61.240 (VirusTotal)
• 80.47.61.240:2222 (ThreatFox)
• 80.47.61.240 (Feodo Tracker)
• 80.47.61.240 (Censys)
• 185.80.53.210 (Censys)

For more analysis of QakBot network traffic, check out my Hunting for C2 Traffic video.

Posted by Erik Hjelmvik on Thursday, 02 March 2023 12:43:00 (UTC/GMT)

Tags: #QakBot​ #QBot​ #C2​ #Video​ #malware-traffic-analysis.net​ #ThreatFox​ #ec74a5c51106f0419184d0dd08fb05bc​ #fd4bc6cea4877646ccd62f0792ec0b62​ #CapLoader​ #NetworkMiner​