Detect attacks on your network with Maltrail
Outlook
Maltrail is also at home in virtual environments. For instance, you can analyze the network traffic of guest systems in a VMware infrastructure. The ESXi host has a Python interpreter on board, but Maltrail works better as a standalone virtual machine. The VM needs one network adapter per port group. Because Maltrail accesses the IP packets via PCAP, the port group or virtual switch needs permission to use promiscuous mode. In this setup, Maltrail works only with copies of the packets. This keeps the virtual servers accessible even if the sensor process throws errors or the Maltrail VM is not running.
The Maltrail sensor can, of course, report to its own server, but it can also feed Syslog and Logstash. To do this, it formats its messages as standardized syslogs or as structured JSON. This support for logging means you can integrate Maltrail into a larger log infrastructure or include it as part of a logging-as-a-service strategy.
Conclusions
The lightweight Maltrail network scanner analyzes network traffic for suspicious activity, gleaning information from freely available blacklists and reputation databases. Maltrail also acts like an intrusion detection system: It loads signatures and compares them with the inspected IP packets. If a match occurs, an alert appears on the dashboard to warn the admin. Maltrail is not an all-around no-worries package, but it is a useful building block in a security strategy.
Infos
- Maltrail: https://github.com/stamparm/maltrail
- Fritzdump: https://github.com/ntop/ntopng/blob/dev/tools/fritzdump.sh
- Script access to speedport: https://github.com/koutheir/speedport-w724v-external-ip-address
- Compiling Pcapy on Windows: https://github.com/helpsystems/pcapy/wiki/Compiling-Pcapy-on-Windows-Guide
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