More Results from Realeyes

For the past few weeks, I have been learning a lot about the site where the Realeyes pilot project is being run. After seeing several reports of incidents from Europe and Asia, it occurred to me that I could create a rule to monitor non-US IP addresses.

To do this, I got the IANA IPv4 Address Assignments, and created a list of the high order octet assigned to each of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The rule was simply a SYN packet and any match on the first octet of the source address with a value in the list.

At first, I simply turned it loose, which generated over 20,000 reports. I was able to reduce that quickly by filtering on the "Referer:" field. First were the requests being referred by one of the site's own web servers. Then I found other sites, such as Google, that were referring browsers to the monitored network. These were all defined in a single Action , which was then defined in the Event with the 'NOT' flag set. This resulted in about 5,000 reports which have been further reduced by adding some of the site's commonly requested web pages to the filter.

The rule is now: Any connection requested by an IP address in Europe, Asia, Africa, or Latin America that is not referred by a site server or one in a list of other servers, and is not requesting one of a list of web pages. If a match is found, the first 64k of both halves of the session are reported. I was thinking of adding a filter where the web server responds with a 200 message, but that could miss a successful exploit.

Of the reported sessions, many are web crawlers for various international search engines. A large number are being referred by other servers. And a fair number appear to be overseas students. Many of the web crawler and overseas student connections consisted of over 100 sessions. Using the 'Ignore Source Address' option, I could close the incidents for a single source IP address without creating a report in a single click. This allowed me to reduce the reports by 2,000 - 3,000 fairly quickly.

And that left me with about 1,000 connections of 1 - 5 sessions each. It was easy to display the playback window and see the client request and the server response and make a decision on whether it was valid or not. Usually, the server responded with a 200 code and sent the requested page. I was able to check about 10 of these per minute, so it only took a couple of hours to run through the entire list.

As far as invalid activity, there have been several targetted scans. By this I mean that the requests are only sent to web servers, and they actually make HTTP requests. These were easy to see by sorting the reports on the source IP address and looking for connections to multiple servers.

The most interesting one was 'GET /manager/html'. This appears to be a Tomcat exploit which tries to gain access to the administrator account. Of the dozen web servers that received this request, all but one replied with 404 "Not Found". The other one replied with 401 "Unauthorized" and the source host then sent over 150 variations of the authorization code field. The codes were mixtures of numbers and mixed case letters that looked like they were taken from a table. Some were as long as 25 characters, while others were only 5 or 6 characters. Fortunately, none were successful.

Another interesting discovery was that one of the monitored site's web servers was being used to store data. An application to allow students to participate in workgroup activities had been broken into and data was stored for some of those sites that are links in spam. It was the response from the server that alerted me to this. I saw a list of keywords meant to generate a lot of hits in search engines. I was then able to report the full path of the request to the web administrator and the server was cleaned of this and a few other pages.

The lesson I take from this is that Realeyes is capable of collecting a broad range of data, filtering it effectively, and providing enough information to analysts to very quickly determine the severity level of incidents. The rules for monitoring can be customized and tuned for the site's requirements, giving analysts and administrators a deep view of their environment. And since that is what I set out to do with this project, I am quite pleased.

Later . . . Jim