Bulk Upload to PacketTotal

We've recently released an open-source toolset that, among other things, allows you to analyze PCAPs in bulk on PacketTotal.com. The toolset can be easily inserted into your network analysis workflow and can be used to capture network traffic for an arbitrary time, or upload multiple packet captures at once for analysis.

SnappyCap also tracks the status of each analysis submission, and will quickly return whether any malicious signatures fired.

In order to begin using this tool you must first fill out this form to be granted the ability to write to our public S3 repository.

Capture Glyphs!

Captures Glyphs are a super high level representation of the traffic inside a PCAP. At a glance, you can determine roughly how many sessions occurred within the capture, how many of those sessions were TCP, UDP, or ICMP, and the rough duration.

Each unit, or square inside a Capture Glyph represents a TCP, UDP, or ICMP session. The pixel in the middle of each square represent the duration of that session. This glyph for example represents a PCAP that contains about 50% TCP traffic 50% UDP traffic. If we zoom in we can clearly see sessions that lasted over 60 seconds, and some that were very short as well.

We are incredibly excited about this update, as it provides a brand new (and kind of beautiful) way of visualizing packet captures. A glyph is automatically created when you upload a PCAP to PacketTotal.com. If you have a cool glyph, be sure to tweet it at us!(@PacketTotal/@TheJaminBecker)

Bulk IOC Search

PacketTotal now contains almost 35,000 packet captures, over 70,000,000 records, and 20,000,000,000 data-points, this has lead to some challenges around searching and sorting the data.

Over the past few months search has gotten several improvements. We modified our algorithm to pre-process queries, and optimize them prior to search. We've doubled the number of nodes on our ElasticSearch backend, and added backend load-balancing. However, even with all these improvements making large queries, those with hundreds or even thousands of strings, poses technical issues with the current infrastructure.

Obviously, being able to search our dataset quickly is a huge priority, and to get around the technical barriers we created a separate query infrastructure on AWS. This query infrastructure provides the ability to run distributed searches asynchronously, which translates to lots of queries very fast.

To test this infrastructure we have created a tool called Bulk IOC Search Utility, which can take in a list of up to 100 line separated IPs, URLs, domains, hashes, etc. We are also planning additional projects that will leverage this infrastructure. These will be tracked here.

So give it a try! Like the rest of the site it's absolutely free. If you find the tool useful please feel free to shoot us a tweet! (@PacketTotal/@TheJaminBecker) 

Introducing PCAP Tagging

Up until this point, PacketTotal has functioned as a completely autonomous analysis engine. Meaning a capture is analyzed and results generated without any additional user-interaction. Strictly, relying on automatically generated analysis can result in users making false assumptions about the benignity of the traffic contained within. Our underlying IDSs won't catch everything, and there are often times that it makes sense for a user to be able to add additional information that was missed by analysis.

Enter tagging, which addresses this gap by allowing anyone to tag a missed insights in a capture.

Any user can add tags and references to an existing PCAP, which are periodically reviewed by the PacketTotal team to ensure efficacy. 

Tagged captures will contain a "Community Tags" tab. So next time you upload a PCAP be sure to add some helpful tags so other users can find it more easily.

Private Instance & Public API

A busy seven months since our last post, and now that we're past the half way mark an update is well overdue. With that being said we are super excited about the updates we have planned, and I wanted to share some of the highlights of what we have accomplished and what we are working on this year.

General Updates

1. WhoIs/IP2Geo lookups are experiencing transient issues, as we are having to switch backends for both services. We expect to have these services at 100% by end of August.
2. Our team is growing! As we are a free service we are always looking for contributors! Last month we welcomed @BigDataBryce to the team who is already making some massive improvements to the codebase.
3. Due to popular demand we've shifted almost all our focus to a private instance of the tool.

Private Instance

A lot of discussion at the beginning of the year went into prioritizing feature additions. We received quite a bit of feedback around how people we're using the tool, and what is lacking. The request repeated most often was for a private version of the tool; understandable given the sensitive nature of packet-captures.

The first half of the year was spent re-writing the analysis engine, and laying the groundwork for a several major enhancements. Because of this I have little to show from a UI perspective, however the private version will include several UI improvements that were impractical to implement on PacketTotal.com. 

File Rendering/PE Details

Current PCAP analysis solutions do a poor job (in my opinion) of representing extracted content. We'd love to change this by providing a simple view of extracted content, where additional post-processing is conducted against executables. 

Below is an example of media extracted, identified, enriched, and rendered in new "files" view. This view will support rendering of all major video types and images, and provide additional metadata around these. 

Analyze 1, 10 or 10,000 PCAPs

PacketTotal.com relies on multiple levels of analysis in order to extract metadata and artifacts from submitted PCAPs. This process is computationally expensive and we we're hesitant to allow this on the public site for this reason. However, we considered bulk analysis a must-have feature for a private instance.

Again, the UI is still very much in the works, but you will be able to upload practically any archive format containing the PCAPs you wish to analyze.

Other Features Additions

1. Geo View for location based data both inferred and extracted from the capture
2. Improved Timeline View will include timelines for every protocol, not just sessions
3. VOIP Extraction & Replay
4. A/V detection against extracted artifacts
5. JavaScript de-obfuscation
6. PacketTotal.com Integration - search for similar PCAPs across our public datastore.

Public API

Even with the shift in priorities to develop a private instance of this tool we have no intention of abandoning development of the public site. Indeed, our second most requested addition was to expose search capabilities through a public API. Much of the required groundwork has already been laid to facilitate this addition. At this point most of the changes that need to be made to make a public API a reality are infrastructure related. Users can expect a public search API by end of year, early next year.

I am working to share updates more frequently with our users, if you have any feature suggestions or questions please feel free to comment below!

New Years Resolutions - 2018 Roadmap

PacketTotal.com is almost one year old, and has come a long way since the initial release of the tool. The theme for 2017 was around usability and functionality. We wanted to make the process of analyzing packet captures easy, and provide a simple platform for sharing these captures with others. With the release of PacketTotal 2.0 these objectives have mostly been completed!

Going into 2018 we are shifting our focus towards making the tool more community oriented and more accessible to developers.

The main focuses this year:

• Improve intelligence aspects of the tool. This means new analyzers and intelligence sources as well as continued improvements to the search algorithm.

• Build out a community. Much of the analysis found within packet-captures could be further enriched with community knowledge. You will continue to be able to submit packet captures as normal through the web-site, but will also have the option to login and be granted additional access to the tool (Details forthcoming).

• Add features for researchers and developers. A public API has been in the works for some time, and will be released this year. Going a step further we plan to release a private virtual appliance that researchers can setup locally in their own lab environments. An SDK is also being developed and will ship with the virtual appliance.

Thank you to all those who have had a chance to use the tool or suggested additional features!