Archive for July, 2010


Today I was in need for fun and so I started adding a new API call which allows to check if a domain is malicious or not. The check avoids to hit the database at all but just queries the search index. The results I got are quite surprising. Take a look at it considering  that code 409 means ‘Object already exists’ while code 410 means ‘Object does not exist’.

Let’s start with a benign domain not tracked by TIP.

buffer@alnitak ~ $ time wget http://xxxx.xxxx.xx/api/check/domain/test@@it/
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 410 GONE
2010-07-22 17:46:58 ERROR 410: GONE.

real    0m0.017s
user    0m0.001s
sys    0m0.001s

Now let’s move to a malicious domain tracked by TIP.

buffer@alnitak ~ $ time wget http://xxxx.xxxx.xx/api/check/domain/hazelpay@@ru/
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 409 CONFLICT
2010-07-22 17:47:07 ERROR 409: CONFLICT.

real    0m0.022s
user    0m0.000s
sys    0m0.002s

It’s really a long time I do not post about TIP. The good news is that TIP is starting growing really fast and this is mainly due to its modular design which allows to plug different kind of tracking modules with minimum effort. In this post I’ll provide a brief overview of the new still integrated features and the upcoming ones.

First of all, a new TIP Collector module named Malware was integrated and currently it handles data coming from GLSandbox, a sandbox for automated malware analysis written by Guido Landi. Other than just analyzing malware samples behavior, the idea is to collect additional data coming from such analysis too. An example of such interesting data is related to C&C identification which can be automatically handled by a botnet monitoring tool for further analysis. Another example is related to information about domains which could lead to the identification of new fast-flux domains.GLSandbox code is currently not public but plans exist to release it in the next future. A search engine was integrated in TIP in the last version! The idea is to index the database in order to be able to search into it with great efficiency and performance. In order to implement it, Haystack was used. The first tests were done using Apache Solr (deployed as Apache Tomcat application) as backend and confirm it works like a charm!  A new REST API was designed and realized in order to be able to more easily search and share data with other users and/or applications. The API was realized using Django-Piston and supports OAuth authentication. Moreover the last version of TIP supports Django 1.2 and stops supporting previous versions (due to some incompatible changes between versions 1.1 and 1.2) and introduces support to migrations using South in order to more easily make changes to the database schema while developing.

A lot of new cool features, a lot of upcoming cool ones! Stay tuned!

Bad Behavior has blocked 15 access attempts in the last 7 days.