Threat Assessments with Argus

A useful practice for both incident response and general discovery, is the practice of threat assessments using session/flow data. My tool of choice for this is Argus, but any session/flow tool such as NetFlow or SANCP will do. For further information beyond this post, reference the book Extrusion Detection for extensive details of traffic threat assessments with both Argus and SANCP. I'll assume you are already familiar with collecting Argus data, if not have a look at the Argus labels on this blog for articles pertaining to it.

What I'll describe here for conducting a threat assessment, is what I call a blind threat assessment. What I mean by "blind", is that I am not looking for particular traffic like you would when responding to an incident - where you know a victim address, and possibly a source address and protocols. In the past during any downtime that I had, I would pick an Argus data file (which I generally rotate either daily or every X number of hours, depending on how busy the sensor collecting the data is), and pick it apart.

Let's move on to an example, reading in your Argus file of choice.

ra -nn -r /data/argus_data.arg

This pulls in and displays all the data in the Argus file, including src/dst IPs & ports, data transferred, etc. But let's apply some BPFs to it - let's say your mail server is at address 192.168.l.25, and for this assessment you don't care about traffic to/from it.

ra -nn -r /data/argus_data.arg - not host 192.168.1.25

So now on the screen scrolls by gobs of data that does not contain anything related to your mail server at that address. Next, we may decide that any web traffic is of no interest to us today - so we append more BPFs to our current one and continue to whittle down the amount of traffic displayed by the Argus client.

ra -nn -r /data/argus_data.arg - not host 192.168.1.25 and not port 80 and not port 443

Next, you realize you are seeing a bunch of ARP traffic that is of little use to you currently - so let's get rid of it too.

ra -nn -r /data/argus_data.arg - not host 192.168.1.25 and not port 80 and not port 443 and not arp

The basic premise of this blind assessment is to narrow down your view of the data until you get to various things you may never notice, such as a user running a new peer-to-peer client or a rogue MP3 server on your corporate network. You can continue to limit with BPFs, adding them on to the end of your list, or start utilizing rasort to find larger bandwidth sessions (maybe you like the noisy stuff). The whole principle of this blind threat assessment, is that there is no wrong way of doing it - stumbling randomly across some weird connection then applying a human's logic to it, is something your traditional signature-based NIDS can't do.

You won't always be able to catch everything this way, as depending on how much traffic you look at and what you decide to globally eliminate, huge chunks of traffic will never be reviewed. Nonetheless, I feel that the occasional, manual review, adds value as you usually turn up something interesting that you did not know about. So take fifteen minutes of your day or week, and notice something new.