Malcom – Malware Communications Analyzer 2019

Malcom is a tool designed to analyze a system’s network communication using graphical representations of network traffic, and cross-reference them with known malware sources.

This comes handy when analyzing how certain malware species try to communicate with the outside world. This tool can help you for the following;

detect central command and control (C&C) servers
understand peer-to-peer networks
observe DNS fast-flux infrastructures
quickly determine if a network artifact is ‘known-bad’

The aim of this tool is to make malware analysis and intel gathering faster by providing a human-readable version of network traffic originating from a given host or network. Convert network traffic information to actionable intelligence faster.

Also Read:Evilginx2 : Standalone Man-In-The-Middle Attack Framework

Malcom Installation

It is written in python. Provided you have the necessary libraries, you should be able to run it on any platform. I highly recommend the use of python virtual environments (virtualenv) so as not to mess up your system libraries.

The following was tested on Ubuntu server 14.04 LTS:

Install git, python and libevent libs, mongodb, redis, and other dependencies

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential git python-dev libevent-dev mongodb libxml2-dev libxslt-dev zlib1g-dev redis-server libffi-dev libssl-dev python-virtualenv

Clone the Git repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/tomchop/malcom.git malco

Create your virtualenv and activate it:

$ cd malcom
$ virtualenv env-malcom
$ source env-malcom/bin/activate

Get and install scapy:

$ cd ..
$ wget http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/files/scapy-latest.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf scapy-latest.tar.gz
$ cd scapy-2.1.0
$ python setup.py install

Still from your virtualenv, install necessary python packages from the requirements.txt file:

$ cd ../malcom
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

For IP geolocation to work, you need to download the Maxmind database and extract the file to the malcom/Malcom/auxiliary/geoIP directory. You can get Maxmind’s free (and thus more or less accurate) database from the following link: http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/geolite2/:

$ cd Malcom/auxiliary/geoIP
$ wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLite2-City.mmdb.gz
$ gunzip -d GeoLite2-City.mmdb.gz
$ mv GeoLite2-City.mmdb GeoIP2-City.mmdb

Launch the webserver from the tools directory using ./malcom.py. Check ./malcom.py –help for listen interface and ports.

For starters, you can copy the malcom.conf.example file to malcom.conf and run ./malcom.py -c malcom.conf.

Technical specs

It was written mostly from scratch, in Python. It uses the following frameworks to work:

flask – a lightweight python web framework
mongodb – a NoSQL database. It interfaces to python with pymongo
redis – An advanced in-memory key-value store
d3js – a JavaScript library that produces awesome force-directed graphs (https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery)
bootstrap – a CSS framework that will eventually kill webdesign, but makes it extremely easy to quickly “webize” applications that would only work through a command prompt.

Disclaimer

This tool was coded during my free time. Like a huge number of tools we download and use daily, we wouldn’t recommend to use it on a production environment where data stability and reliability is a MUST.

It may be broken, have security gaps (running it as root in uncontrolled environments is probably not a good idea), or not work at all.
It’s written in python, so don’t expect it to be ultra-fast or handle huge amounts of data easily.
I’m no coder, so don’t expect to see beautiful pythonic code everywhere you look. Or lots of comments.

It’s in early stages of development.

Download

Credit: Thomas Chopitea

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