How Could Cuckoo Sandbox Help Network Security Analysts?
Introduction
Cuckoo Sandbox is an Open Source software for automating analysis of suspicious files. It is designed to be flexible, so it’s possible to support any type of file format. The goal is to provide a tool that helps you automate the process of analyzing unknown malware samples .
Cuckoo Sandbox works by monitoring the behavior of the malicious process while running in an isolated environment. After that, we can inspect the behavior and review it in a recorded HTML report .
When you run Cuckoo Sandbox for the first time , it takes some time to initialize and format your hard disk. Once this process is done, you can load your malware inside the virtual machine by using simple drag-and-drop.
How Could Cuckoo Sandbox Help Network Security Analysts
Following Ways Cuckoo Sandbox is Beneficial to Network Security Analyst:
1) Network Security Analysts spend a lot of time manually running suspicious samples in security products such as IDS/IPS, Firewall or Vulnerability Scanners. This process is known to be very inefficient because the analyst needs to extract each file and perform the analysis on local machines. In addition, these kinds of solutions are not scalable. If you work with several analysts and hundreds of malware samples per day then you really need something like Cuckoo Sandbox that can automate this task.
2) Cuckoo Sandbox will be a useful tool to quickly understand the behavior of a new threat . By using this software, Network Security Analysts can easily run malware in an isolated environment and then observe its actions. With this amazing tool, you can create your own automated reports by writing Python code.
3) Network Security Analysts could find it very helpful when performing Incident Response tasks such as: Learning about an unknown threat , Dump memory from a machine infected with malware , Perform Deep Packet Inspection on traffic from the internal network or the internet .
4) Cuckoo Sandbox is built upon solid grounds. Inside its architecture you’ll find modules for all steps required in a malware analysis process . These modules are written in Python and they’re easy to extend and customize . Cuckoo Sandbox is a product of rapid development and we consider it as an ongoing project which will grow with the community’s help.
Additional benefits:
1. Helps in understanding how malware spreads on the network
2. Identify the trust relationships between endpoints, servers and other infrastructure components (e.g. DNS records)
3. Identifying the communication channels used by malware to talk with Command & Control servers (C&C).
4. Testing your own tools by using it against malwares which are not yet detected or fully analyzed by security products.
5. Catching malware samples that are not yet detected or blacklisted by your network security solution (IDS/IPS).
6. Capture the HTTP requests made by malware to detect if it spreads via drive-by downloads .
7. Detection of new threats and zero days attacks, etc…
Why is Cuckoo Sandbox a good solution?
There are a lot of malware analysis tools out there. Each one has its benefits and drawbacks but, in general, they all have a common problem: The learning curve . We may need to spend some time reading the documentation before we can actually use them. In addition, it’s pretty hard for newbies to understand how these products work. In some cases you’ll find that most of these solutions require installation of additional software on the machine that runs the analysis process.
As I said above, Cuckoo Sandbox is different from other security products because it doesn’t require any installation on your local machine. All you need is a modern web browser with a flash player installed inside it . You can even Cuckoo Sandbox from your smartphone!
In my opinion, Cuckoo Sandbox is a simple but powerful tool that can be easily used by anyone. In addition to that, most of its modules are written in Python and they’re easy to understand . I’m pretty sure Network Security Analysts could find it useful when performing malware analysis tasks. Cuckoo Sandbox is an excellent choice if you need a simple solution with a low cost of ownership . As a community-driven project, many people have contributed to make it different from other similar software.
Conclusion
Cuckoo Sandbox is a malware analysis system. It’s different from other similar software because it provides an easy-to-use web interface and, in general, we can say that it was designed to be used by anyone . We all know the importance of sandboxing in computer security and this tool doesn’t need any installation on your machine in order to run its tests. During our tests we’ve also noticed that Cuckoo Sandbox is pretty flexible and in most cases you’ll find that it takes less than 5 minutes to add support for a new file format or program.
We really appreciate the flexibility offered by this tool due to the fact that it’s written in Python. The community involved with Cuckoo Sandbox has developed different extensions by writing Python code for this project. This fact also makes it possible to customize the behavior of this product for our needs.
