Tag Archives: tools

more mailserver fun

I’m still working through my quarantine folders. There are about 300 emails in each folder, and there are 62 folders. The folders are named 0-9, a-z, and A-Z. I don’t know why SpamAssassin / Amavisd on Debian does it that way, but it does.

Anyway going through them one at time with zless, and then rm was a bit of a pain. So I wrote a quick little one-liner to help:

The problem is, not all of the files are in gzip format, so it didn’t display those. And going in and out of the page system for Less was an annoying flash between the pager system and the normal terminal output.

So I improved it, using zcat, because I had some issues with zgrep not supporting some grep switches, like recursive.

Now it didn’t launch the pager, so no flashing. The second thing it did was give me just the To, From, Subject, and Date fields, and I could decide to delete or not based on block of info provided. Downside was it still didn’t handle the non-gzip files.

So when I got up today, I thought why not create a shell script to do this. And I can add in the feature to release false positives that SpamAssassin put in the folders.

So I now have a Mail Administration script in my DFIR repository on GitHub, that will check if it is gzip or not. Use the right form of grep, show info, and ask what to do with the file, release or delete (or nothing if you don’t use r or d as the answer).

Still some minor issues with the script:

  1. Must be ran as root, or someone else that has access to the virusmail sub-directories. in my case that means root since the mail accounts have /bin/false set up for shells.
  2. To be more portable it has to be called from spam sub-directory. In my case spam is in /var/lib/amavis/virusmails/. Which means I have to go there, and then in to one of the 0-9, a-z, or A-Z directories first. Like so:

     
  3. I still have 300 or so emails in each folder so I’d rather work 1 folder at a time right now to clear them.

Future plans for the script:
Ask the user where their spam folder is, so the script can be called outside of those folders, and enumerate all the sub-folders.

I also have to find out if the 0-9a-zA-Z is the same for all versions of software or if that is just a Debian thing.

SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and ADSP

For a while now, I’ve been having problems with DKIM. It wasn’t working. My logs always had the same error:

And I’d look for a fix but never find anything useful.

Today I decided to go through my mail quarantine folders. In them I found several emails from a friend who is having problems with spammers using his email address. None of them are going through his mail server, they’re all spoofed. We’ve compared our SPF records and they look right. So I went and looked up why I’m seeing all these mails.

Turns out that not all mail admins have set up their servers right to look at SPF and block. That was my problem.

So I went and found a howto for my operating system to fix SPF with my Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). The document, provided by my VPS hosting provider, had how to set up SPF, how to configure my MTA to quarntine emails that fail SPF, a DKIM walk through, a ADSP howto, and a DMARC howto, all on the same page.

First things first. I fixed the SPF inbound. Now it should do the stuff it needs to. Then I figured since I still had time, I’d go after the DKIM problem.

So I backed up my existing files and followed along. AND NOTHING WORKED!. Still the same problem. Heck even the same error message.

So an

later and I started completely fresh. Nothing old, not even the old backup files.

And it still didn’t work. sysctrl status -l opendkim.service and journalctrl -xe were not much help either. Neither one gave enough information on what was wrong.

I did some searching through the logs, and found that even after changing the port to a local socet for Milter it still couldn’t work. But this time I found that it couldn’t see the files, and searching the directory that local socket should be in, it wasn’t there. After much googling I found an old bug report for Debian (my OS of choice). If the socket and pid files were missing, do this:

And suddenly everything was working. I sent test emails to test services, and they seem to be working. At least they told me that everything works.

Then I went why not and set up the ADSP and DMARC stuff in DNS.

Really just happy to get past the problem where dkim isn’t working. Now to go finish clearing out the quarantine files.

Validate data, before sharing.

I’m going to have to add a couple more slides to my Threat Intelligence: From Zero to Basics deck. But I told GrrCON that I would have an updated deck from Circle City Con anyway.

Over the last two weeks I’ve seen some stuff shared publicly in Threat Intelligence Platforms, that really shouldn’t have been. The data wasn’t valid, at the time of sharing.

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Script(s) to extract HTTP Host data from file

A while ago, created a new repository on GitHub for the scripts I wrote for DFIR. Since then, it only had the Computer Ping script in it. Today I added the first of the Extractor scripts.

The first extractor script, xHttpExtractor.py came about from a web based tool I used. It would run on a file uploaded to it, and then list a bunch of indicators, system artifacts, url calls outs, network communication, etc. However the tool didn’t have a good export mechanism at the time. So I would copy and paste everything to a text file, and then extract the url host details from the text files. Mainly so I could add the URL indicators to the web proxy.

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Different ways to use TOR

While catching up on SANS’ Internet Storm Center Storm Cast during my drive, I heard this episode. In it Johannes Ullrich was mentioned this article about using DRM Decloaking TOR users. Short version, users running the Tor Browser Bundle click a link, and Microsoft Windows launches the media player not using the TOR network, exposing the user’s real IP address.

This attack could be mitigated by using TAILS or something else that forces all traffic through TOR. Which made me think I should share all the ways I use TOR.

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You can’t buy threat intelligence, or yet another “article” on Data vs Information Vs Intelligence.

The background:
This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for a few months now. It’s based in part off a twitter conversation that carried over in to a phone call. It is also something I’ve personally observed, a trap I fell in to, and heard other Threat Intelligence people say they observed. And while reading Cyint’s favorite tweets of 2016, I finally decided to sit down and write.

In the tweet list was a tweet was from Alex Pinto asking ‘how many more #ThreatIntel articles do we need about the difference between “data”, “information” and “intelligence”?’

So my answer is, as many as it takes to break out of our own echo-chamber / choir and figure out how to talk to our Cybersecurity peers and the stakeholders. So everyone is able to understand what is being bought. So here is yet another article talking about Intelligence vs Data Feeds being sold as Intelligence.

The Problem:
Companies are selling data feeds while calling it intelligence.

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Script(s) to ping a computer

I re-wrote a script I use at work. It was a messy bit of Python 3 previously. While it’s still not the cleanest of python scripts, it scratches my itch. It was originally just a straight line of commands with lots of repeated code. I made some functions and made it a little more modular. I know I need to learn PEP8, and start following it. This was just to improve something that I wrote previously with things I learned from Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.

I’ve shared it via my GitHub repository for DFIR scripts. They’re clean (not tied to any company). There is only Computer Ping for right now. There are 3 scripts all based on the same idea.

Ping a computer, if it is down, keep trying every 10 minutes for 1 hour. Pop an “alert” if the target is up, or the script finished before it came up.

  • 1 version for Windows running python (wComputerPing.py)
  • 1 version for Windows running Cygwin (cwComputerPing.py)
  • 1 version for boxes running Linux. (lComputerPing.py).

I’ll write others and upload to the repository as I have time / re-write stuff I use. They might not all be Python, but my goal is to be more Python than not.

Why I don’t have a lab

An industry mailing list I’m on recently had a conversation that started asking about Master Degrees but had some hiring managers chip in. They said a question they tend to ask is to have the candidate tell about their home lab.

I’ve been asked this question a few times in the past, and I’ve asked people this question in job interviews. I know it’s to find out what kind of passion the candidate has for the job, but I think it’s starting to become a bad question to ask.

Here is why I don’t have a home lab.

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CSEC630 Lab 2

Ok. The lab was pretty much what I expected.

Click this Panic button to reset everything. Go look at this pcap in Wireshark. Run this command in cmd.exe (and even walks the student through opening a term window by go to the start button, type cmd in the run box).

Run Snort with the test option on a pre-defined rule set using the pcap you looked at. Modify the same rule multiple times, enabling and disabling an alert each time. Run to see the difference.

Answer these 10 questions.

The last question was how to improve the class… I forgot to say use a Linux VM instead of a Windows VM. Since one of my answers did require Grep. Which means copy and paste from the VM lab to my box connected to the lab.