Quick Malware Analysis: SMARTAPESG / NETSUPPORT RAT / STEALC pcap from 2025-03-26

Thanks to Brad Duncan for sharing this pcap from 2025-03-26 on his malware traffic analysis site! Due to issues with Google flagging a warning for the site, we're not including the actual hyperlink but it should be easy to find.

We did a quick analysis of this pcap using Security Onion 2.4.150:

https://blog.securityonion.net/2025/05/security-onion-24150-celebrating.html

If you'd like to follow along, you can do the following:

• install Security Onion 2.4.150 in a VM:
  https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/first-time-users.html
• import the pcap using the SOC Grid interface:
  https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/grid.html#icons-in-lower-left-corner
• optionally enable the DNS lookups feature:
  https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/soc-customization.html?#reverse-dns-lookups

The screenshots at the bottom of this post show some of the interesting alerts, metadata logs, and session transcripts. Want more practice? Check out our other Quick Malware Analysis posts at:

https://blog.securityonion.net/search/label/quick%20malware%20analysis

About Security Onion

Security Onion is a versatile and scalable platform that can run on small virtual machines and can also scale up to the opposite end of the hardware spectrum to take advantage of extremely powerful server-class machines.  Security Onion can also scale horizontally, growing from a standalone single-machine deployment to a full distributed deployment with tens or hundreds of machines as dictated by your enterprise visibility needs. To learn more about Security Onion, please see:
https://securityonion.net

Screenshots

First, we start with the overview of all alerts and logs:

Next, let's focus on just the alerts. We start off in the default aggregated view:

For each of these aggregated alerts, let's drill down and see more detail about the individual alerts and the AI Summary on the right side:

Now that we've reviewed the alerts, let's review the network protocol metadata provided by Zeek:

Weird protocol anomalies:

Software determined by User Agent string:

Dynamic Protocol Detection errors:

QUIC traffic:

Windows Portable Executable (PE) files:

Zeek notices:

x509 logs for TLS/SSL traffic:

HTTP traffic:

Drilling into the HTTP POST requests and pivoting to PCAP transcript, we see:

Scrolling down, we see some base64 encoded uploads, so let's send those to CyberChef and decode them to see what kind of victim information was sent to the attacker:

DNS lookups:

File transfers:

SSL/TLS traffic:

All network connections:

Did you know Security Onion scales from small virtual machines all the way up to large enterprise deployments of hundreds of nodes and thousands of endpoint agents?

A minimal Security Onion installation is an IMPORT installation and can be used to import PCAP or EVTX files in a minimal VM with as little as 4GB RAM:

On the opposite end of the architecture spectrum, a distributed deployment consists of:

•  a manager node
• one or more forward nodes running Suricata and Zeek to analyze network traffic and generate NIDS alerts and protocol metadata logs
• one or more search nodes running Elasticsearch to store and search logs
• optional receiver nodes for load balancing and pipeline redundancy
• optional Intrusion Detection Honeypot (IDH) nodes for deception

This is a scalable model and can support hundreds of nodes and thousands of endpoints running the Elastic Agent.

For more information, please see the Architecture section of our documentation:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/architecture.html

Did you know that you can run Security Onion in as little as 4GB RAM?

Do you just want to import PCAP or EVTX files into Security Onion?

Or do you have limited hardware and just want the minimal installation to get some basic experience with Security Onion?

If so, then you can install Security Onion and choose the Import option. You can do this in a minimal virtual machine with as little as 4GB RAM!

You can see the 4GB RAM in the Memory Usage section of this screenshot:

You can read more about Import in the Architecture section of our documentation:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/architecture.html

You can also see a full walkthrough of the Import option in the First Time Users section of our documentation:

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.4/first-time-users.html

Security Onion 2.1 (Release Candidate 2) Available for Testing!

In 2018, Security Onion Solutions started working on the next major version of Security Onion, code-named Hybrid Hunter:
https://blog.securityonion.net/2018/11/security-onion-hybrid-hunter-101-tech.html

We recently dropped the Hybrid Hunter code name and announced 2.0 (RC1).  Today, we are proud to release Security Onion 2.1 (Release Candidate 2)! It has some amazing new features and improvements!

One new feature in this release is that the installer now includes a new option for a dedicated import node. An import node is a single standalone box that runs just enough components to be able to import a pcap using so-import-pcap. When you run so-import-pcap, it analyzes the pcap using Suricata and Zeek and the resulting logs are picked up by Filebeat and sent to Elasticsearch where they are parsed and indexed. You can then view those logs in Security Onion Console (SOC). All this can be done in a minimal virtual machine with only 4GB RAM! For screenshots of the new import node, see the Screenshot Tour at the bottom of this blog post.

Another new feature that you'll see in the Screenshot Tour is that our new Hunt interface is better than ever! It now dynamically updates the columns in the bottom data table based on the actual data type that you're looking at. For example, if you're looking at DNS logs, Hunt will show columns that are relevant to DNS logs like the DNS query, type, and response code.  Additionally, you'll notice that where field values used to have two magnifying glass icons (one to include the value in the search and the other to exclude the value from the search), there is now a third magnifying glass icon. This new icon starts a new search for just the value itself.

Release Candidate

This is our second Release Candidate for the new 2.x platform, so we're getting closer to a final release, but we're not quite there yet. Please be reminded of the usual pre-release warnings and disclaimers:

• If this breaks your system, you get to keep both pieces!
• This is a work in progress and is in constant flux.
• This configuration may change drastically over time leading up to the final release.
• Do NOT run this on a system that you care about!
• Do NOT run this on a system that has data that you care about!
• This script should only be run on a TEST box with TEST data!
• Use of this script may result in nausea, vomiting, or a burning sensation.

Documentation

We've started migrating our documentation to 2.1:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.1/

However, this is a work in progress and some documentation may be missing or incorrect. Please let us know if you notice any issues.

Existing Installations

If you have an existing 2.0 (RC1) installation, please see the soup page on our documentation site:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.1/soup.html

New Installations

If you want to do a new installation, please review the 2.1 documentation and then you can find instructions here:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.1/download.html

Questions or Problems

If you have questions or problems, please see:
https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.1/community-support.html

Known Issues

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.1/release-notes.html#known-issues

Changes from Previous Releases

https://docs.securityonion.net/en/2.1/release-notes.html#changes

Thanks

Lots of love went into this release!

Special thanks to all our folks working so hard to make this release happen!

• Josh Brower
• Jason Ertel
• Wes Lambert
• Josh Patterson
• Mike Reeves
• Bryant Treacle
• William Wernert

Screenshot Tour

The screenshots below show the new Import node running in a minimal VM with only 4GB RAM!