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Month: June 2019

Using Drill for Network Forensics: Part 1

I have been working on using Apache Drill for security purposes and I wanted to demonstrate how you can use Drill in a real security challenge. I found this contest which included a PCAP file of an actual attack, as well as a series of questions you would want to answer in order to the analysis. (https://www.honeynet.org/node/504)

My thought here is that Drill’s advanced ETL capabilities are not terribly useful if you can’t use Drill to do basic stuff that tools like Wireshark can do already, so I wanted to see if it would work in real life. This example was good because I also had “the answers” so I could see how Drill stacks up to the contest winners.

First, I had to see if Drill could actually read the PCAP. The PCAP reader can be a bit wonky, but fortunately, Drill read it without issues! (Whew!). For these examples, I will be using Drill and Superset.

Part one will contain a demonstration of how to use Drill to answer the questions in the first part of the challenge.

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