Category Archives: Threat Intelligence

Quick And Dirty Log Analysis Followup

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Earlier this week, I posted some tips for doing Quick and Dirty PA Firewall Log Analysis.

After I posted this, I got a very common question, and I wanted to answer it here.

The question is something along the lines of “When I use the techniques from your post, the outputs of the commands are column separated data. I need them to be CSV to use with my (tool/SEIM/Aunt Gracie/whatever). How can I convert them?” Sound familiar?

OK, so how do we accomplish this feat of at the command line without all of the workarounds that people posted, and without EVER loading Excel? Thankfully we can use awk again for this.

We can use:

  • awk ‘BEGIN { OFS = “,”} ; {print $1,$2,$3}’
    • Basically, take an input of column data, and print out the columns we want (can be any, in this case I want the first 3 columns), and make the outputs comma delimited.
    • We can just append this to our other command stacks with another pipe (|) to get our output CSV
  • Example: cat log.csv | awk ‘BEGIN { FS = “,”} ; {print $8,$9}’ | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -n -r | awk ‘BEGIN { OFS = “,”} ; {print $1,$2,$3}’
    • In this example, the source IP and destination IP will be analyzed, and the reduced to unique pairs, along with the number of times that that pair is duplicated in the input log (I use this as a “hit rate” as I described earlier
      • A common question, why do I ask for two columns in the first awk and then ask for three columns in the second awk?
        • The answer of course, is that the first awk prints the unique pairs, but it also adds a column of the “hit rate”, so to get the output appropriately, I need all three fields.

So, once again, get to know awk. It is your friend.:)

PS – Yes, I know, there are hundreds of other ways to get this same data, in the same format, using other command line text processing tools. Many may even be less redundant than the commands above. BUT, this is how I did it. I think it makes it easy for people to get started and play with the data. Post your ways to Twitter or share with the community. Exploration is awesome, so it will encourage users to play more. Cool! Hit me on Twitter if you wanna share some or talk more about this approach (@lbhuston).

Thanks for reading!

Quick & Dirty Palo Alto Log Analysis

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OK, so I needed to do some quick and dirty traffic analysis on Palo Alto text logs for a project I was working on. The Palo Alto is great and their console tools are nice. Panorama is not too shabby. But, when I need quick and dirty analysis and want to play with data, I dig into the logs. 
 
That said, for my quick analysis, I needed to analyze a bunch of text logs and model the traffic flows. To do that, I used simple command line text processing in Unix (Mac OS, but with tweaks also works in Linux, etc.)
 
I am sharing some of my notes and some of the useful command lines to help others who might be facing a similar need.
 
First, for my project, I made use of the following field #’s in the text analysis, pulled from the log header for sequence:
  • $8 (source IP) 
  • $9 (dest IP)
  • $26 (dest port)
  • $15 (AppID)
  • $32 (bytes)
 
Once, I knew the fields that corresponded to values I wanted to study, I started using the core power of command line text processing. And in this case, the power I needed was:
  • cat
  • grep
    • Including, the ever useful grep -v (inverse grep, show me the lines that don’t match my pattern)
  • awk
    • particularly: awk ‘BEGIN { FS = “,”} ; {print $x, $y}’ which prints specific columns in CSV files 
  • sort
    • sort -n (numeric sort)
    • sort -r (reverse sort, descending)
  • uniq
    • uniq -c (count the numbers of duplicates, used for determining “hit rates” or frequency, etc.)
 
Of course, to learn more about these commands, simply man (command name) and read the details. 😃 
 
OK, so I will get you started, here are a few of the more useful command lines I used for my quick and dirty analysis:
  • cat log.csv | awk ‘BEGIN { FS = “,”} ; {print $8,$9,$26}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r > hitrate_by_rate.txt
    • this one produces a list of Source IP/Dest IP/Dest Port unique combinations, sorted in descending order by the number of times they appear in the log
  • cat log.csv | awk ‘BEGIN { FS = “,”} ; {print $8,$9}’ | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -n -r > uniqpairs_by_hitrate.txt
    • this one produces a list of the uniq Source & Destination IP addresses, in descending order by how many times they talk to each other in the log (note that their reversed pairings will be separate, if they are present – that is if A talks to B, there will be an entry for that, but if B initiates conversations with A, that will be a separate line in this data set)
  • cat log.csv | awk ‘BEGIN { FS = “,”} ; {print $15}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r > appID_by_hitrate.txt
    • this one uses the same exact techniques, but now we are looking at what applications have been identified by the firewall, in descending order by number of times that application identifier appears in the log
 
Again, these are simple examples, but you can tweak and expand as you need. This trivial approach to command line text analysis certainly helps with logs and traffic data. You can use those same commands to do a wondrous amount of textual analysis and processing. Learn them, live them, love them. 😃 
 
If you have questions, or want to share some of the ways you use those commands, please drop us a line on Twitter (@microsolved) or hit me up personally for other ideas (@lbhuston). As always, thanks for reading and stay safe out there! 

Pay Attention to Egress Anomalies on Weekends

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Just a quick note to pay careful attention to egress anomalies when the majority of your employees are not likely to be using the network. Most organizations, even those that are 24/7, experience reduced network egress to the Internet during nights and weekends. This is the perfect time to look for anomalies and to take advantage of the reduced traffic levels to perform deeper analysis such as a traffic level monitoring, average session/connection sizes, anomalies in levels of blocked egress ports, new and never before seen DNS resolutions, etc. 

If you can baseline traffic, even using something abstract like net flow, you may find some amazing stuff. Check it out! 

From Dark Net Research to Real World Safety Issue

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On a recent engagement by the MSI Intelligence team, our client had us researching the dark net to discover threats against their global brands. This is a normal and methodology-driven process for the team and the TigerTrax™ platform has been optimized for this work for several years.

We’ve seen plenty of physical threats against clients before. In particular, our threat intelligence and brand monitoring services for professional sports teams have identified several significant threats of violence in the last few years. Unfortunately, this is much more common for high visibility brands and organizations than you might otherwise assume.

In this particular instance, conversations were flagged by TigerTrax from underground forums that were discussing physical attacks against the particular brand. The descriptions were detailed, politically motivated and threatened harm to employees and potentially the public. We immediately reported the issue and provided the captured data to the client. The client reviewed the conversations and correlated them with other physical security occurrences that had been reported by their employees. In today’s world, such threats require vigilant attention and a rapid response.

In this case, the client was able to turn our identified data into insights by using it to gain context from their internal security issue reporting system. From those insights, they were able to quickly launch an awareness campaign for their employees in the areas identified, report the issue to localized law enforcement and invest in additional fire and safety controls for their locations. We may never know if these efforts were truly effective, but if they prevented even a single occurrence of violence or saved a single human life, then that is a strong victory.

Security is often about working against things so that they don’t happen – making it abstract, sometimes frustrating and difficult to explain to some audiences. But, when you can act on binary data as intelligence and use it to prevent violence in the kinetic world, that is the highest of security goals! That is the reason we built TigerTrax and offer the types of intelligence services we do to mature organizations. We believe that insights like these can make a difference and we are proud to help our clients achieve them.

3 Reasons You Need Customized Threat Intelligence

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Many clients have been asking us about our customized threat intelligence services and how to best use the data that we can provide.

1. Using HoneyPoint™, we can deploy fake systems and applications, both internally and in key external situations that allow you to generate real-time, specific to your organization, indicators of compromise (IoC) data – including a wide variety of threat source information for blacklisting, baseline metrics to make it easy to measure changes in the levels of threat actions against your organization up to the moment, and a wide variety of scenarios for application and attack surface hardening.

2. Our SilentTiger™ passive assessments, can help you provide a wider lens for vulnerability assessment visibility than your perimeter, specifically. It can be used to assess, either single instance or ongoing, the security posture of locations where your brand is extended to business partners, cloud providers, supply chain vendors, critical dependency API and data flows and other systems well beyond your perimeter. Since the testing is passive, you don’t need permission, contract language or control of the systems being assessed. You can get the data in a stable, familiar format – very similar to vulnerability scanning reports or via customized data feeds into your SEIM/GRC/Ticketing tools or the like. This means you can be more vigilant against more attack surfaces without more effort and more resources.

3. Our customized TigerTrax™ Targeted Threat Intelligence (TTI) offerings can be used for brand specific monitoring around the world, answering specific research questions based on industry / geographic / demographic / psychographic profiles or even products / patents or economic threat research. If you want to know how your brand is being perceived, discussed or threatened around the world, this service can provide that either as a one-time deliverable, or as an ongoing periodic service. If you want our intelligence analysts to look at industry trends, fraud, underground economics, changing activist or attacker tactics and the way they collide with your industry or organization – this is the service that can provide that data to you in a clear and concise manner that lets you take real-world actions.

We have been offering many of these services to select clients for the last several years. Only recently have we decided to offer them to our wider client and reader base. If you’d like to learn how others are using the data or how they are actively hardening their environments and operations based on real-world data and trends, let us know. We’d love to discuss it with you! 

Getting Smart with Mobile App GeoLocation to Fight Fraud

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If your mobile application includes purchases with credit cards, and a pickup of the merchandise, then you should pay attention to this.

Recently, in our testing lab and during an intelligence engagement, we identified a fraud mechanism where stolen credit cards were being used via the mobile app in question, to fraudulently purchase goods. In fact, the attackers were selling the purchase of the goods as a service on auction and market sites on the dark web.

The scam works like this. The bad guys have stolen credit cards (track data, likely from dumps), which they use to make a purchase for their client remotely. The bad guys use their stolen track data as a card not present transaction, which is standard for mobile apps. The bad guys have access to huge numbers of stolen cards, so they can burn them at a substantial rate without impacting their inventory to a large extent. The bad guy’s customer spends $25 in bitcoins to get up to $100 in merchandise. The bad guy takes the order from the dark net, uses the mobile app to place the order, and then delivers the receipt and/or pickup information to the bad guys customer. The customer then walks into the retailer and shows the receipt for their mobile order, picking up the merchandise and leaving.

The bad guy gets paid via the bitcoins. For them, this is an extremely low risk way to convert stolen credit card info to cash. It is significantly less risky for them than doing physical card replication, ATM use or other conversion methods that have a requirement for physical interaction.

The bad guy’s customer gets paid by picking up the merchandise. They get up to $100 value for a cost of $25. They take on some risk, but if performed properly, the scam is low risk to them, or so they believe. In the odd event, they simply leave the store after making their demands for satisfaction. There is little risk of arrest or prosecution, it would seem, especially at the low rate of $100 – or at least that was how the bad guy was pitching it to their prospective customers…

The credit card issuer or the merchant gets stuck. They are out the merchandise and/or the money, depending on their location in the world, and the merchant agreement/charge back/PCI compliance issues they face.

Understanding the fraud and motivations of the bad guys is critical for securing the systems in play. Organizations could up their validation techniques and vigilance for mobile orders. They could add additional fraudulent transaction heuristics to their capability. They could also implement geo-location on the mobile apps as a control – i.e.. If the order is being physically placed on a device in Ukraine, and pick up is in New York, there is a higher level of risk associated with that transaction. Identifying ways  to leverage the sensors and data points from a mobile device, and rolling it into fraud detection heuristics and machine learning analytics is the next wave of security for some of these applications. We are pleased to be helping clients get there…

To hear more about modern fraud techniques, application security testing or targeted threat intelligence like what we discussed above, drop us a line (info at microsolved dot com) or via Twitter (@lbhuston). We look forward to discussing it with your team.

Brands Being Used in Pornography Search Engine Poisoning

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Recently, during one of our TigerTrax™Targeted Threat Intelligence engagements, we were performing passive threat assessments for a popular consumer brand. In the engagement, we not only gathered targeted threat intelligence about their IT environments, applications and hosting partners, but also around the use of their brand on a global scale. The client had selected to take advantage of our dark net intelligence capabilities as well, and were keenly interested in how the dark net, deep web and underground portions of the Internet were engaged with their brand. This is a pretty common type of engagement for us, and we often find a wide variety of security, operational and reputational issues.

This particular time around, we ran into a rather interesting and new concern, at least on the dark net. In this case, a dark net pornography site was using the consumer brand embedded as an HTML comment in the porn site’s main pages. Overall, there were several hundred name brands in the comments. This seems to have been performed so that the search engines that index the site on the dark net, associate the site with the brands. That means when a user searches for the brand name, they get the porn site returned as being associated. In this case, it was actually the first link on several of the dark net search sites we tested. The porn site appears to be using the brand names to lure eyeballs to the site – essentially to up the chance of finding a subscriber base for their particularly nasty set of pornography offerings. Search engine poisoning has been an issue on the public web for some time, and it is a commonly understood tactic to try and link your content to brands, basically serving as “click bait” for users. However, on the dark net, this was the first time we had observed this tactic being used so overtly.

The brand owner was, of course, concerned about this illicit use of their brand. However, there is little they could do to respond, other than reporting the site to the authorities. Instead, after discussing various options, we worked with them to identify an action and response plan for how they would handle the problem if it became a public concern. We also worked with them to identify a standard process that they could follow to bring their existing legal, marketing, management and other parts of their incident response team up to date on threats like these as they emerged.

The client was very pleased to have the discussion and with the findings we identified. While any misuse of their brand is a concern, having their brand associated with pornography or other illicit material is certainly unnerving. In the end, there is little that organizations can do, other than work with authorities or work on take down efforts if the brand is misused on the public web. However, having the knowledge that the issue is out there, and working to develop the threat into existing response plans certainly goes a long way to help them minimize these kinds of risks.

To learn more about dark net brand issues, targeted threat intelligence or passive assessments, drop us a line (info@microsolved dot com) or get in touch on Twitter (@lbhuston) for a discussion. 

Emulating SIP with HoneyPoint

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Last week, Hos and I worked on identifying how to emulate a SIP endpoint with HoneyPoint Security Server. We identified an easy way to do it using the BasicTCP capability. This emulation component emulates a basic TCP service and performs in the following manner:

  • Listens for connections
  • Upon connection, logs the connection details
  • Sends the banner file and awaits a response
  • Upon response, logs the response data
  • Sends the response, repeating the wait and log loop, resending the response to every request
  • When the connection limit is reached, it closes the connection
It has two associated files for the emulation:
  • The banner file – “banner”
  • The response file – “response”

In our testing, we were able to closely emulate a SIP connection by creating a banner file that was blank or contained only a CR/LF. Then we added the appropriate SIP messaging into the response file. This emulates a service where thew connection is completed and logged, and the system appears to wait on input. Once input is received, then a SIP message is delivered to the client. In our testing, the SIP tools we worked with accepted the emulation as SIP server and did not flag any anomalies.

I’ll leave the actual SIP messaging as a research project for the reader, to preserve some anonymity for HPSS users. But, if you are an HPSS user and would like to do this, contact support and we will provide you with the specific messaging that we used in our testing.

As always, thanks for reading and especially thanks for being interested in HoneyPoint. We are prepping the next release, and I think you will be blown away by some of the new features and the updates to the documentation. We have been hard at work on this for a while, and I can’t wait to share it with you shortly!

Interesting Talk on Post Quantum Computing Impacts on Crypto

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If you want to really get some great understanding of how the future of crypto is impacted by quantum computing, there is a fantastic talk embedded in this link. 
 
The talk really turns the high level math and theory of most of these discussions into knowledge you can parse and use. Take an hour and listen to it. I think you will find it most rewarding.
 
If you want to talk about your thoughts on the matter, hit us up on Twitter. (@microsolved)

Time Warner – 320,000 passwords compromised

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Knock knock! Who’s there? The FBI….

This is never the way you’d like your day to play out. Last week, Time Warner was notified by the FBI that a cache of stolen credentials that appear to belong to Time Warner customers had been discovered.

At this point, the origination of the usernames and passwords is a bit of a mystery. Time Warner states: 

“We have not yet determined how the information was obtained, but there are no indications that TWC’s systems were breached.

The emails and passwords were likely previously stolen either through malware downloaded during phishing attacks or indirectly through data breaches of other companies that stored TWC customer information, including email addresses.

For those customers whose account information was stolen, we are contacting them individually to make them aware and to help them reset their passwords.”

Time Warner customers who have not yet been contacted should still consider changing their  passwords – there is no indication at this point if this is new or previously compromised password data, and a new password is never a bad idea.

Please share with anyone who is using Time Warner systems – friends, co-workers, weird relatives and neighbors as well. Remember that any password that is used twice isn’t a safe password – unique passwords are always the best practice. Password managers (LastPass, KeePass, etc.) are often a good idea to help maintain unique, difficult to decipher passwords.