Search API Beta

Today we are incredibly excited to announce the beta preview of our Search API!

With it you can search, correlate, and download PCAP files, based on their behaviors and contents.

Exploring the API's Use-Cases

Understand how tactics, threats, and procedures (TTPs) of malicious adversaries evolve over time.

Network traffic is among some of the richest forms of evidence available to security professionals, it is also one of the hardest to analyze at scale. PacketTotal, has analyzed thousands of malicious packet captures, and derived millions of signatures, relationships, and correlations between them.
The Search API provides a powerful interface for finding network traffic that can help you understand, and anticipate the actions of malware in your own environment. Simple search for an indicator of compromise and pull back matching captures, use AND and OR aggregators to get as granular as you want with your queries.

Identifying top threats and their targeted sectors.

Understanding the goals of malicious adversaries is the first step in proactive security.
From malware detonated in a lab to evil found in the wild, PacketTotal is the most diverse set of malicious packet captures on the Internet.
Search by the latest malware campaigns, and see how it communicates, who they're targeting, and what methods they employ. 

Build or validate your network signatures through heuristic based approach.

PacketTotal does a good job of providing high-level categorizations of traffic found within packet captures. Through the API you can download captures that you could use to validate controls within your own environment.

Train your Machine Learning models!

If you're a data-scientist, and are lucky enough to be studying malicious network behaviors, you may find the bulk search and download functionality of the search api to be very useful in training your models. 

Interested in being a part of the Beta?

Ultimately, the search api is the first step in a much more comprehensive API that will offer full feature parity with the site (and more). If anything about this post excites you please consider giving our API a spin!

Faster Infrastructure & Beta API - Coming Soon!

Your data model can make or break your application, but it is secondary to your infrastructure. In theory your infrastructure would dictate your initial design decisions and influence your data model. However, as a developer you often find yourself tweaking both, in parallel. This often leads to bizarre and terrible design patterns.

PacketTotal 1.0 ran on a two node ElasticSearch cluster, with a local based retention backend for raw pcaps.

This was the case with the original version of PacketTotal, and it has lead to some scalability issues. Since the initial release we have addressed several of these by adding redundancy, load-balancing, and caching, but it doesn't solve the underlying issue - that our infrastructure was designed for a few concurrent users, not dozens.

PacketTotal 2.0 ran on a much more robust ElasticSearch cluster, and migrated much of it's raw PCAP processing and retention to AWS serverless infrastructure.

To date PacketTotal has focused very much on static based PCAP analysis. As we collect, categorize, and enrich this data it becomes obvious that there is a holistic value to this it as well. A few use-cases:

Malware Archive gives you insight into malicious traffic from a variety of sources

• Understanding how tactics, threats, and procedures (TTPs) of malicious adversaries evolve over time.
• Identifying top threats and their targeted sectors.
• Dynamically detecting IOCs through heuristic based approach.
• Dynamically creating new signatures based around "known bad" and "likely bad"
• Creating archives to categorize types of traffic interesting to students and researchers

To accomplish this we have begun the process of firstly migrating our existing data to a higher availability ElasticSearch cluster and removing some previous bottlenecks on our network. Secondly, we've re-indexed our data, and mapped it to field specific data-types. This dramatically increases search performance and accuracy as well as our ability to correlate across datasets, allowing us to start delivering on some of the use-cases above.

The new infrastructure is still undergoing testing, and will not be put into production until mid-march. In the meantime, stay tuned for the beta API release later this month which we will be making available to those interested!