NetworkMiner is a Network Forensic Analysis Tool (NFAT) for Windows (but also works in Linux / Mac OS X / FreeBSD). NetworkMiner can be used as a passive network sniffer/packet capturing tool in order to detect operating systems, sessions, hostnames, open ports etc. without putting any traffic on the network. NetworkMiner can also parse PCAP files for off-line analysis and to regenerate/reassemble transmitted files and certificates from PCAP files.
NetworkMiner collects data (such as forensic evidence) about hosts on the network rather than to collect data regarding the traffic on the network. The main user interface view is host centric (information grouped per host) rather than packet centric (information showed as a list of packets/frames).
NetworkMiner has, since the first release in 2007, become a popular tool among incident response teams as well as law enforcement. NetworkMiner is today used by companies and organizations all over the world.
NetworkMiner can extract files and certificates transferred over the network by parsing a PCAP file or by sniffing traffic directly from the network. This functionality can be used to extract and save media files (such as audio or video files) which are streamed across a network from websites such as YouTube. Supported protocols for file extraction are FTP, TFTP, HTTP, SMB and SMTP.
User credentials (usernames and passwords) for supported protocols are extracted by NetworkMiner and displayed under the "Credentials" tab. The credentials tab sometimes also show information that can be used to identify a particular person, such as user accounts for popular online services like Gmail or Facebook.
Another very useful feature is that the user can search sniffed or stored data for keywords. NetworkMiner allows the user to insert arbitrary string or byte-patterns that shall be searched for with the keyword search functionality.
NetworkMiner Professional comes installed on a specially designed USB flash drive. You can run NetworkMiner directly from the USB flash drive since NetworkMiner is a portable application that doesn't require any installation. We at Netresec do, however, recommend that you copy NetworkMiner to the local hard drive of your computer in order to achieve maximum performance.
There are several longed-for features that are part of this major release, such as:
- SMB/CIFS parser now supports file extraction from SMB write operations.
- Added parser for SMB2 protocol (read and write).
- Additional IEC-104 commands implemented.
- Added Modbus/TCP parser (as requested by attendees at 4SICS 2014).
- Improved SMTP parser.
- Improved FTP parser.
- Improved DNS parser.
- GUI flickering is heavily reduced when loading PCAP files or doing live sniffing.
- Extraction of web server favicon images (shown in Hosts tab).
- Added "Keyword filter" to several tabs (see more details below).