Toolsmith #126: Adversary hunting with SOF-ELK

As we celebrate Independence Day, I'm reminded that we honor what was, of course, an armed conflict. Today's realities, when we think about conflict, are quite different than the days of lining troops up across the field from each other, loading muskets, and flinging balls of lead into the fray.
We live in a world of asymmetrical battles, often conflicts that aren't always obvious in purpose and intent, and likely fought on multiple fronts. For one of the best reads on the topic, take the well spent time to read TJ O'Connor's The Jester Dynamic: A Lesson in Asymmetric Unmanaged Cyber Warfare. If you're reading this post, it's highly likely that your front is that of 1s and 0s, either as a blue team defender, or as a red team attacker. I live in this world every day of my life as a blue teamer at Microsoft, and as a joint forces cyber network operator. We are faced, each day, with overwhelming, excessive amounts of data, of varying quality, where the answers to questions are likely hidden, but available to those who can dig deeply enough.
New platforms continue to emerge to help us in this cause. At Microsoft we have a variety of platforms that make the process easier for us, but no less arduous, to dig through the data, and the commercial sector continues to expand its offerings. For those with limited budgets and resources, but a strong drive for discovery, that have been outstanding offerings as well. Security Onion has been forefront for years, and is under constant development and improvement in the care of Doug Burks.
Another emerging platform, to be discussed here, is SOF-ELK, part of the SANS Forensics community, created by SANS FOR572, Advanced Network Forensics and Analysis author and instructor Phil Hagen. Count SOF-ELK in the NFAT family for sure, a strong player in the Network Forensic Analysis Tool category.
SOF-ELK has a great README, don't be that person, read it. It's everything you need to get started, in one place. What!? :-)
Better yet, you can download a fully realized VM with almost no configuration requirements, so you can hit the ground running. I ran my SOF-ELK instance with VMWare Workstation 12 Pro and no issues other than needing to temporarily disable Device Guard and Credential Guard on Windows 10.
SOF-ELK offers some good test data to get you started with right out of the gate, in /home/elk_user/exercise_source_logs, including Syslog from a firewall, router, converted Windows events, a Squid proxy, and a server named muse. You can drop these on your SOF-ELK server in the /logstash/syslog/ ingestion point for syslog-formatted data. Additionally, utilize /logstash/nfarch/ for archived NetFlow output, /logstash/httpd/ for Apache logs, /logstash/passivedns/ for logs from the passivedns utility, /logstash/plaso/ for log2timeline, and  /logstash/bro/ for, yeah, you guessed it.
I mixed things up a bit and added my own Apache logs for the month of May to /logstash/httpd/. The muse log set in the exercise offering also included a DNS log (named_log), for grins I threw that in the /logstash/syslog/ as well just to see how it would play.
Run down a few data rabbit holes with me, I swear I can linger for hours on end once I latch on to something to chase. We'll begin with a couple of highlights from my Apache logs. The SOF-ELK VM comes with three pre-configured dashboards including Syslog, NetFlow, and HTTPD. You can learn more in the start page for the SOF-ELK UI, my instance is http://192.168.50.110:5601/app/kibana. There are three panels, or blocks, for each dashboard's details, at the bottom of the UI. I drilled through to the HTTPD Log Dashboard for this experiment, and immediately reset the time period for analysis (click the time marker in the upper right hand part of the UI). It defaults to the last 15 minutes, if you're reviewing older data it won't show until you adjust to match your time stamps. My data is from the month of May so I selected an absolute window from the beginning of May to its end. You can also select quick or relative time options, it's great to get comfortable here quickly and early. The resulting opening visualizations for me made me very happy, as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: HTTPD Log Dashboard

Nice! An event count summary, source ASNs by count (you can immediately see where I scanned myself from work), a fantastic Access Source map, a records graph by HTTP verbs, and one by response codes.
The beauty of these SOF-ELK dashboards is that they're immediately interactive and allow you to drill right in to interesting data points. The holisticinfosec.org website is intentionally flat and includes no active PHP or dynamic content. As a result, my favorite response code as a web application security tester, the 500 error, is notably missing. But, in both the timeline graphs we note a big traffic spike on 8 MAY 2017, which correlates nicely with my above mention scan from work, as noted in the ASN hit count, and seen here in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Traffic spike from scan

This visualizes well but isn't really all that interesting or uncommon, particularly given that I know I personally ran the scan, and scans from the Intarwebs are dime a dozen. What did jump out for me though, as seen back in Figure 1, was the presence of four PUT requests. That's usually a "bad thing" where some @$$h@t is trying to drop something on my server. Let's drill in a bit, shall we? After clicking the graph line with the four PUT requests, I quickly learned that two requests came from 204.12.194.234 AS32097: WholeSale Internet in Kansas City, MO and two came from 119.23.233.9 AS37963: Hangzhou Alibaba Advertising in Hangzhou, China. This is well represented in the HTTPD Access Source panel map (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Access Source

The PUT request from each included a txt file attempt, specifically dbhvf99151.txt and htjfx99555.txt, both were rejected, redirected (302), and sent to my landing page (200).
Research on the IPs found that 119.23.233.9 was on the "real time suspected malware list as detected by InterServer's intrusion systems" as seen 22 MAY, and 204.12.194.234 was found twice in the AbuseIPDB, flagged on 18 MAY 2017 for Cknife Webshell Detected. Now we're talking. It's common to attempt a remote file include attack or a PUT, with what is a web shell. I opened up SOF-ELK on that IP address and found eight total hits in my logs, all looking for common PHP opportunities with the likes of GET and POST for /plus/mytag_js.php, noted in PHP injection attack attempts.
SOF-ELK made it incredibly easy to hunt down these details, as seen in Figure 4 from the HTTPD Discovery panel.

Figure 4: Discovery

That's a groovy little hunting trip through HTTPD logs, but how about a bit of Syslog? I spotted I likely oddity that could be correlated across a number of the exercise logs, we'll see if the correlation is real. You'll notice tabs at the top of your SOF-ELK UI, we'll use Discover for this experiment. I started from the Syslog Dashboard with my time range set broadly on the last two months. 7606 records presented themselves, sliced neatly by hosts and programs, as seen in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Syslog Dashboard

Squid proxy logs showed the predominance of host entries (6778 or 57.95% of 11,696 to be specific), so I started there. Don' laugh, but I'll often do keyword queries just to see what comes up, sometimes you land a pointer to a good rabbit hole. Within the body of 6778 proxy events, I searched malware. Two hits came back for GET request via a JS redirector to bleepingcomputer.com for your basic how-to based on "random websites opening in Chrome". Ruh-roh.

Figure 6: Malware keyword

More importantly, we have an IP address to pivot on: 10.3.59.53. A search of that IP across the same 6778 Squid logs yielded 3896 entries specific to this IP, and lots to be curious about:

• datingukrainewomen.com 
• anastasiadate.com
• YouTube videos for hair loss
• crowdscience.com for "random pop-ups driving me nuts"

Do I need to build this user profile out for you, or are you with me? Proxy logs tell us so much, and are deeply worthy of your blue team efforts to collect and review.
I jumped over to the named_log from the muse host to see what else might reveal itself. Here's where I jumped to Discover, the Splunk-like query functionality inherent to SOF-ELK (and ELK implemetations). I did reductive query to see what other oddities might surface: 10.3.59.53 AND dns_query: (*.co.uk OR *.de OR *.eu OR *.info OR *.cc OR *.online OR *.website). I used these TLDs based on the premise that bots using Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA) will often use the TLDs. See The DGA of PadCrypt to learn more, as well as ISC Diary handler John Bambanek's OSINT logic. The query results were quite satisfying, 29 hits, including a number of clearly randomly generated domains. Those that were most interesting all included the .cc TLD, so I zoomed in further. Down to five hits with 10.3.59.53 AND dns_query: *.cc, as seen in Figure 7.

Figure 7:. CC TLD hits

Oh man, not good. I had a hunch now, and went back to the proxy logs with 10.3.59.53 AND squid_request:*.exe. And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, hunch rewarded (Figure 8).

Figure 8: taxdocs.exe

It taxdocs.exe isn't malware, I'm a monkey's uncle. Unfortunately, I could find no online references to these .cc domains or the .exe sample or URL, but you get the point. Given that it's exercise data, Phil may have generated it to entice to dig deeper.
When we think about the IOC patterns for Petya, a hunt like this is pretty revealing. Petya's "initial infection appears to involve a software supply-chain threat involving the Ukrainian company M.E.Doc, which develops tax accounting software, MEDoc". This is not Petya (as far as I know) specifically but we see pattern similarities for sure, one can learn a great deal about the sheep and the wolves. Be the sheepdog!
Few tools better in the free and open source arsenal to help you train and enhance your inner digital sheepdog than SOF-ELK. "I'm a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf." ~ LTC Dave Grossman, from On Combat.

Believe it or not, there's a ton more you can do with SOF-ELK, consider this a primer and a motivator.
I LOVE SOF-ELK. Phil, well done, thank you. Readers rejoice, this is really one of my favorites for toolsmith, hands down, out of the now 126 unique tools discussed over more than ten years. Download the VM, and get to work herding. :-)
Cheers...until next time.

toolsmith: Sysmon 2.0 & EventViz

Prerequisites

Windows operating system

R 3.1.2 and RStudio for EventViz

Congratulations and well done to Josh Sokol for winning 2014 Toolsmith Tool of the Year with his very popular SimpleRisk!

Overview

Sysmon 2.0 was welcomed to the world on 19 JAN 2015, warranting immediate attention as part of The State of Cybersecurity focus for February’s ISSA Journal. If you want to better understand the state of cybersecurity on your Windows systems, consider System Monitor (Sysmon) a requirement. Sysmon is “a Windows system service and device driver that, once installed on a system, remains resident across system reboots to monitor and log system activity to the Windows event log. It provides detailed information about process creations, network connections, and changes to file creation time.” The real upside is that you can ship related events using Windows Event Collection or the agent provided as part of your preferred SIEM implementation. You can also conduct simple exports of EVTX files during forensic or malware runtime analysis for parsing and queries. I built EventViz in R, as a Shiny app, to simplify this process and read CSV exports from Windows Event Viewer. It’s a work in progress to be certain, but one you can make immediate use of in order to pivot on key data in Sysmon logs.

I pinged Thomas Garnier, who along with Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, created Sysmon. Thomas pointed out that the need to understand our networks, how they are used or abused, has never been higher. He also reminded us that, unfortunately, there is a gap between the information needed by network defenders and the information provided by operating systems across versions. To that end, “Sysinternals Sysmon was created to provide rich information across OS versions while running in the background staying resident across reboots. It provides detailed information on process creation, image loading, driver loading, network connections and more. It allows you to easily filter generated events and update its configuration while it is still running. All the activities are captured in the Windows event log to integrate with existing Windows Event Collection or SIEM solutions.”

Of the eight Event IDs generated by Sysmon, you can consider six immediately useful for enhancing situational awareness and strengthened defenses. You’ll want to tune and optimize how you configure Sysmon so you don’t flood your logging systems with data you determine later isn’t as helpful as you hoped. The resulting events can be quite noisy given the plethora of data made available per the following quick event overview:

·         Event ID 1: Process creation

o   The process creation event provides extended information about a newly created process.

·         Event ID 2: A process changed a file creation time

o   The change file creation time event is registered when a file creation time is explicitly modified by a process. Attackers may change the file creation time of a backdoor to make it look like it was installed with the operating system, but many processes legitimately change the creation time of a file.

·         Event ID 3: Network connection

o   The network connection event logs TCP/UDP connections on the machine. It is disabled by default.

·         Event ID 4: Sysmon service state changed

o   The service state change event reports the state of the Sysmon service (started or stopped).

·         Event ID 5: Process terminated

o   The process terminate event reports when a process terminates.

·         Event ID 6: Driver loaded

o   The driver loaded events provides information about a driver being loaded on the system.

·         Event ID 7: Image loaded

o   The image loaded event logs when a module is loaded in a specific process. This event is disabled by default and needs to be configured with the –l option.

I love enabling the monitoring of images loaded during malware and forensic analysis but as the Sysmon content says, “this event should be configured carefully, as monitoring all image load events will generate a large number of events.” I’ll show you these Event IDs come to play during review of a system compromised by a Trojan:Win32/Beaugrit.gen!AAA sample using EventViz to analyze Sysmon logs. Beaugrit.gen is a rootkit that makes outbound connections to request data and download files while also interacting with Internet Explorer.

Sysmon installation

I had the best luck downloading Sysmon and unpacking it into a temp directory.  From an administrator command prompt I changed directory to the temp directory and first ran Sysmon.exe -accepteula –i. This accepts the EULA, installs Sysmon as a service, and drops Sysmon.exe in C:\Windows, making it available at any command prompt path. I exited the first administrator command prompt, spawned another one, and ran sysmon –m.  This step installs the event manifest, which helps you avoid verbose and erroneous log messages such as “The description for Event ID 5 from source Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon cannot be found.” I followed that with sysmon -c -n -l -h md5,sha1,sha256. The -c flag updates the existing configuration, -n enables logging of network connections (Event ID 3), -l enables logging the loading (can be noisy) of modules (Event ID 7), and -h defines what hashes you wish to collect as part of event messaging. You may be happier with just one hash type configured to again reduce volume. Once installed and properly configured you’ll find Sysmon logs in the Event Viewer under Applications and Services Logs | Microsoft | Windows | Sysmon | Operational as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Sysmon Operational log entries in Event Viewer

The physical system path is %SystemRoot%\System32\Winevt\Logs\Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon%4Operational.evtx. You can optionally define configuration preferences with a config.xml file, refer to Sysmon documentation for specifics. To create Sysmon CSV files that can be analyzed with EventViz, right click the Operational log as seen in Figure 1 and Save All Event As sysmon.csv. The will result in a CSV version of all Sysmon log entries written to the system your analyzing. Remember that all Windows event logs are set to 65536KB and to overwrite as needed by default. You’ll likely want to factor for updating this to ensure an appropriately sized log sample in order to conduct proper investigations, particularly if you’re not shipping the logs off system.

Analysis with EventViz

Collecting logs is one thing but making quick use of them is the real trick. There are so many ways and means with which to review and respond to particular events as defined by detection and rules logic. Piping Sysmon logs to your collection mechanism is highly recommended. Windows Event Collection/Windows Event Forwarding are incredibly useful, the results of which can be consumed by numerous commercial products. Additionally there are free and open source frameworks that you can leverage. Enterprise Log Search and Archive (ELSA) immediately comes to mind as does the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana). See Josh Lewis’ Advanced ThreatDetection with Sysmon, WEF and Elasticsearch (AKA Panther Detect) as a great reference and pointer.

There are also excellent uses for Sysmon that don’t require enterprise collection methods. You may have single instances of dedicated or virtual hosts that are utilized for runtime analysis of malware and/or other malfeasance. I utilized just such a Windows 7 SP1 virtual machine to test Sysmon capabilities with the above mentioned Beaugrit.gen sample. You can of course utilize the built-in Windows Event Viewer but ease of use and quick pivots and queries are not its strong suit. I’ve started on EventViz to address this issue and plan to keep developing against it. For folks with an appreciation for R, this is a nice exemplar for its use. If you need a good primer on using R for information security-related purposes, I’ve got you covered there. In January, ADMIN Magazine published my article SecurityData Analytics and Visualization with R, which is a convenient and directly useful way for you to get your feet wet with R.

Use of EventViz currently assumes you’ve got a version of R installed, as well as RStudio. At an RStudio console prompt be sure to run install.packages("shiny") as EventViz is a Shiny app that requires the Shiny package. Create a directory where you’d plan to store R scripts, and create an apps directory therein, and an EventViz directory in the apps directory. Mine is C:\coding\R\apps\EventViz as an example. Copy server.R and ui.R, as well as the example CSV file we’re discussing here, to the EventViz directory; you can download them from my Github EventViz repository.  Open server.R and ui.R and click Run App as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2 - Run the EventViz Shiny app

Give it a few minutes it may take a bit to load as it is a crowded log set given the verbosity of Event ID 7 (Image loaded), again, enable it with caution. I’m working on EventViz performance with larger files but you’ll see how Event ID 7 helps us here though. Once it’s loaded you’ll have Figure 3 in a Shiny window. You also have the option to open it in a browser.

Figure 3 - EventViz UI

Each of the drop-down menus represents a column heading in the sysmon.csv albeit with a little manipulation via R where I renamed them and added a header for the messages column.

I’ll work with a bit of insider knowledge given my familiarity with the malware sample but as long as you have a potential indicator of compromise (IOC) such as an IP address or malicious executable name you can get started. I knew that the sample phones home to 920zl.com. When I conducted a lookup on this domain (malicious) it returned an IP address of 124.207.29.185 in Beijing. You may now imagine my shocked face. Let’s start our results analysis and visualization with that IP address. I copied it to the EventViz search field and it quickly filter two results from 9270 entries as seen in Figure 4. This filter is much faster than the initial app load as the whole data set is now immediately available in memory. This is both a benefit and a curse with R. It’s performant once loaded but a memory hog thereafter and it’s not well known for cleaning up after itself.

Figure 4 - EventViz IP address search results

Sysmon Event ID 3 which logs detected network connections trapped C:\tmp\server.exe making a connection to our suspect IP address. Nice, now we have a new pivot options. You could use the Event ID drop-down to filter for all Event ID 3’s for all network connections. I chose to filter Sysmon Event ID 7 and searched server.exe. The results directly matched Virus Total behavioral information for this sample, specifically the runtime DLLs. Sysmon’s Event ID 7 ImageLoad logic clearly shows server.exe acting as indicated by VirusTotal per Figure 5. 

Figure 5 – EventID 7 ImageLoad matches VirusTotal

Drill in via Event ID 1 ProcessCreate and you’ll find that server.exe was spawned by explorer.exe. The victim (me) clicked it (derp). There are endless filter and pivot options given the data provided by Sysmon and quick filter capabilities in EventViz. Eventually (pun intended), EventViz will allow you to also analyze other Windows event log types such as the Security log.

In Conclusion

Sysmon clearly goes above and beyond default Window event logging by offering insightful and detailed event data. Coupled with collection and SIEM deployments, Sysmon can be an incredible weapon as part of your detection logic. Marry your queries up with specific threat indicators and you may be both pleased and horrified (in a good way) with the results. Watch the TechNet blog and the Sysinternals site for further updates to Sysmon. For quick reviews during runtime analysis or dirty forensics a viewer such as EventViz might be useful assuming you export to your Sysmon EVTX file to CSV. Keep an eye on the Github site for improvements and updates. I plan to add a file selector so you can choose from a directory of CSV files. For other feature requests you can submit via Github.

Ping me via email or Twitter if you have questions (russ at holisticinfosec dot org or @holisticinfosec).

Cheers…until next month.

Acknowledgements 
Thomas Garnier, Sysmon 2.0 developer

toolsmith: Collective Intelligence Framework

Prerequisites

Linux for server, stable on Debian Lenny and Squeeze, and Ubuntu v10

Perl for client (stable), Python client currently unstable

Introduction

As is often the case when plumbing the depths of my feed reader or the Dragon News Bytes mailing list I found toolsmith gold. Kyle Maxwell’s Introduction to the Collective IntelligenceFramework (CIF) lit up on my radar screen. CIF parses data from sources such as ZeuS and SpyEye Tracker, Malware Domains, Spamhaus, Shadowserver, Dragon Research Group, and others. The disparate data is then normalized into repository that allows chronological threat intelligence gathering.   Kyle’s article is an excellent starting point that you should definitely read, but I wanted to hear more from Wes Young, the CIF developer, who kindly filled me in with some background and a look forward. Wes is a Principal Security Engineer for REN-ISAC whose mission is to aid and promote cyber security operational protection and response within the higher education and research (R&E) communities. As such the tenor of his feedback makes all the more sense.

“The CIF project has been an interesting experiment for us. When we first decided to transition the core components from incubation in a private trust-based community, to a more traditional open-source community model, it was merely to better support our existing community. We figured, if things were open-source, our community would have an easier time replicating our tools and processes to fit their own needs internally. If others outside the educational space benefited from that (private sector, government sector, etc), then that'd be the icing on the cake.

Years later, we discovered that ratio has nearly inverted itself. Now the CIF community has become lopsided, with the majority of users being from the international public and private spaces. Furthermore, the contribution in terms of testing, bug-fixes, documentation contributions and [more importantly] the word-of-mouth endorsements has driven CIF to become its own living organism. The demonstrated value it has created for threat analysts, who have traditionally had to beg-borrow-and-steal their own intelligence, has become immeasurable in relation to the minor investment of adoption.

As this project's momentum has given it a life all its own, future roadmaps will build off its current success. The ultimate goal of the CIF project is to create a uniform presence of your intelligence, somewhere you control. It'll read your blogs, your sandboxes, and yes, even your email (if you allow it), correlating and digging out threat information that's been traditionally locked in plain, wiki-fied or semi-formatted text. It has enabled organizations to defend their networks with up to the second intelligence from traditional data-sources as well as their peers. While traditional SEMs enable analysts to search their data, CIF enables your data to adapt your network, seamlessly and on the fly. It's your own personal Skynet. :)”

Readers may enjoy Wes’ recent interview on the genesis of CIF, available as a FIRST 2012 podcast.

You may also wish to take a close look at Martin Holste’s integration of CIF with his Enterprise Log Search and Archive (ELSA) solution, a centralized syslog framework. Martin has utilized the Sphinx full-text search engine to create accelerated query functionality and a full web front end.

Installing CIF

The documentation found on the CIF wiki should be considered “must read” from top to bottom before proceeding. I won’t repeat what’s also been said (Kyle’s article has some installation pointers too), but I went through the process a couple of times to get it right so I’ll share my experience. There are a number of elements to consider if implementing CIF in a production capacity. While I installed a test instance on insignificant hardware running Debian Squeeze, if you have a 64-bit system with 8GB of RAM or more and a minimum of four cores with drive space to grow into, definitely use it for CIF. If you can also install a fresh OS, pay special attention to your disk layout while configuring partition mapping during the Large Volume Manager (LVM) setup. Also follow the postgres database configuration steps closely if working from a fresh install. You’ll be changing ident sameuser to trust in pg_hba.conf for socket connections. On weak little systems such as my test server, Kyle’s suggestion to update work_mem to 512MB and checkpoint_segments to 32 in postgresql.conf is a good one. The BIND setup is quite straightforward, but again per Kyle’s feedback, make sure your forwarder IP addresses in /etc/resolv.conf match those you configure in /etc/bind/named.conf.options.

From there the install steps on the wiki can be followed verbatim. During the Load Data phase of configuration you may run into an XML parsing issue. After executing time /opt/cif/bin/cif_crontool -f -d && /opt/cif/bin/cif_crontool -d -p daily && /opt/cif/bin/cif_crontool -d -p hourly you may receive an error. The cif_crontool script is similar to cron, as I hope you’ve sagely intuited for yourself, where it calls cif_feedparser to traverse and load CIF configuration files then instructs cif_feedparser based on the configs. The error, :170937: parser error : Sequence ']]>' not allowed in content, crops up when cif_crontool attempts to parse the cleanmx feed definition in /opt/cif/etc/misc.cfg. You can resolve this by simply commenting out that definition. Wes is reaching out to clean-mx.de to get this fixed, right now there are no other options than to comment out the feed.

To install a client you need only follow the Client Setup steps, and in your ~/.cif file apply the apikey that you created during the server install as described in CIF Config. Don’t forget to configure .cif to generate feed as also described in this section.

A final installation note: if you don’t feel like spending the time to do your own build you have the option to utilize a preconfigured Amazon EC2 instance (limited disk space, not production-ready).

Using CIF

You should set the following up, per the Server Install, as a cron job but for manual reference if you wish to update your data at random intervals, run as sudo su - cif:

1)  PATH=/bin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/cif/bin

2)      Pull feed data:

a.  cif_crontool -p daily -T low

b.  cif_crontool -p hourly -T low

3)      Crunch the data: cif_analytic -d -t 16 -m 2500 (you can up –t and –m on beefier systems but it my grind your system down)

4)      Update the feeds: cif_feeds

You can run cif from the command line; cif –h will give you all the options, cif –q where query string is an IP, URL, domain, etc. will get you started. Pay special attention to the –p parameter as it helps you define output formats such as HTML or Snort.

I immediately installed the Firefox CIF toolbar, you’ll find details on the wiki under Client | Toolbars | Firefox as it make queries via the browser, leveraging the API a no-brainer. See WebAPI on the wiki under API. Screen shots included hereafter will be of CIF usage via this interface (easier than manually populating query URLs).

There a number of client examples available on the wiki, but I’m always one to throw real-world scenarios at the tool du jour. As ZeuS developers continue to “innovate” and produce modules such as the recently discovered two-factor authentication bypass, ZeuS continues in increased usage by cybercriminals. As may likely be the common scenario, an end user on the network you try desperately to protect has called you to say that they tried to update Firefox via a link “someone sent them” but it “didn’t look right” and that they were worried “something was wrong.” You run netstat –ano on their system and see a suspicious connection, specifically 193.106.31.68. Ruh-roh, Rastro, that IP lives in the Ukraine. Go figure. What does Master Cifu say? Figure 1 fills us in.

FIGURE 1: CIF says “here be dragons”

I love mazilla-update.com, bad guy squatter genius. You need only web search ASN 49335 to learn that NCONNECT-AS Navitel Rusconnect Ltd is not a good neighborhood for your end user to be playing in. Better yet, cif –q AS49335 at the command line or drop AS49335 in the Firefox search box.

Figure 2 is a case in point, Navitel Rusconnect Ltd is definitely the wrong side of the tracks.

FIGURE 2: Can I catch a bus out of here?

 ZeuS configs and binaries, SpyEye, stolen credit card gateway, oh my.

This is a good time for a quick overview of taxonomy. Per the wiki, severity equates to seriousness, confidence denotes faith in the observation, and impact is a profile for badness (ZeuS, botnet, etc.).

Our above mentioned user does show mazilla-update.com in their browser history, let’s query it via CIF.

Figure 3 further validates suspicions.

FIGURE 3: Mazilla <> Mozilla

 You quickly discern that your end user downloaded bt.exe from mazilla-update.com. You take a quick md5sum of the binary and drop the hash in the CIF search box. 756447e177fc3cc39912797b7ecb2f92 bears instant fruit as seen in Figure 4.

FIGURE 4: CIF hash search

 Yep, looks like your end user might have gotten himself some ZeuS action.

With a resource such as CIF at your fingertips you should be able to quickly envision value added when using a DNS sinkhole (hello 127.0.0.1) or DNS-BH from malwaredomains.com where you serve up fake replies to any request for the likes of mazilla-update.com. Bonus! Beefy server for CIF: $2499. CIF licensing: $0. Bad guy fail? Priceless.

In Conclusion

Check out the Idea List in the CIF Projects Lab; there is some excellent work to be done including a VMWare appliance, further Snort integration, a Virus Total analytic, and others. This project, like so many others we’ve discussed in toolsmith, grows and prospers with your feedback and contributions. Please consider participating by joining the CIF Google Group and jumping in. You’ll also want to check out the DFIR Journal’s CIF discussions, including integration with ArcSight, as well as EyeIS’s CIF incorporation with Splunk. These are the same folks who have brought us Security Onion 1.0 for Splunk, so I’m imaging all the possibilities for integration. Get busy with CIF, folks. It’s a work in progress but a damned good one at that.

Ping me via email if you have questions (russ at holisticinfosec dot org).

Cheers…until next month.

Acknowledgements

Wes Young, CIF developer, Principal Security Engineer, REN-ISAC