Package Summary

Note

This document is intended to summarize most of the functionality of MSTICPy in a single page but it is difficult to keep it up-to-date. You may find it easier to use the ReadTheDocs menu to browse around the various functions of this package.

Data Acquisition and Queries

See Querying and Importing Data

QueryProviders

msticpy.data.data_providers.QueryProvider

Extensible query library targeting Log Analytics, Splunk, OData and other log data sources. Also special support for Mordor data sets and using local data.

Built-in parameterized queries allow complex queries to be run from a single function call. Add your own queries using a simple YAML schema.

See Query Providers Usage (common to all data sources)

Sample notebook - Data Queries Notebook

Data Processing and Enrichment

Threat Intelligence Providers

msticpy.context.tilookup

The TILookup class can lookup IoCs across multiple TI providers. builtin providers include AlienVault OTX, IBM XForce, VirusTotal and Azure Sentinel.

The input can be a single IoC observable or a pandas DataFrame containing multiple observables. Depending on the provider, you may require an account and an API key. Some providers also enforce throttling (especially for free tiers), which might affect performing bulk lookups.

See Threat Intel Lookup

Sample notebook - TILookup Usage Notebook

vtlookup and vtlookupv3

msticpy.context.vtlookupv3

Wrapper class around Virus Total API. Processing requires a Virus Total account and API key. Supported IoC Types:

  • Filehash

  • URL

  • DNS Domain

  • IPv4 Address

Sample notebook - VTLookup Usage Notebook

IP geo-location lookups

msticpy.context.geoip

Geographic location lookup for IP addresses. This module has two classes for different services:

  • GeoLiteLookup - Maxmind Geolite (see https://www.maxmind.com)

  • IPStackLookup - IPStack (see https://ipstack.com) Both services offer a free tier for non-commercial use. However, a paid tier will normally get you more accuracy, more detail and a higher throughput rate. Maxmind geolite uses a downloadable database, while IPStack is an online lookup (API key required).

See GeoIP Lookup

Sample notebook - GeoIP Lookup Usage Notebook

Azure Resource Data, Storage and Azure Sentinel API

msticpy.context.azure.azure_data msticpy.context.azure.sentinel_core msticpy.data.storage.azure_blob_storage

The AzureData module contains functionality for enriching data regarding Azure host details with additional host details exposed via the Azure API. The AzureSentinel module allows you to query incidents, retrieve detector and hunting queries. AzureBlogStorage lets you read and write data from blob storage.

See Azure Data Enrichment, Microsoft Sentinel APIs Reading from and writing to Azure Blob AzureBlobStorage

Pivot Functions

msticpy.data_model.pivot msticpy.data_model.entities

Lets you use MSTICPy functionality in an “entity-centric” way. All functions, queries and lookups that relate to a particular entity type (e.g. Host, IpAddress, Url) are collected together as methods of that entity class. So, if you want to do things with an IP address, just load the IpAddress entity and browse its methods.

See Pivot Functions

Security Analysis

Anomalous Sequence Detection

msticpy.analysis.anomalous_sequence.anomalous

Detect unusual sequences of events in your Office, Active Directory or other log data. You can extract sessions (e.g. activity initiated by the same account) and identify and visualize unusual sequences of activity. For example, detecting an attacker setting a mail forwarding rule on someone’s mailbox.

See Anomalous Sessions

Sample notebook - Anomalous Sequence Notebook

Time Series Analysis

msticpy.analysis.timeseries

Time series analysis allows you to identify unusual patterns in your log data taking into account normal seasonal variations (e.g. the regular ebb and flow of events over hours of the day, days of the week, etc.). Using both analysis and visualization highlights unusual traffic flows or event activity for any data set.

See Time Series Analysis and Anomalies Visualization

Sample notebook - Time Series

eventcluster

msticpy.analysis.eventcluster

This module is intended to be used to summarize large numbers of events into clusters of different patterns. High volume repeating events can often make it difficult to see unique and interesting items.

The module contains functions to generate clusterable features from string data. For example, an administration command that does some maintenance on thousands of servers with a commandline such as: install-update -hostname {host.fqdn} -tmp:/tmp/{GUID}/rollback can be collapsed into a single cluster pattern by ignoring the character values in the string and using delimiters or tokens to group the values.

This is an unsupervised learning module implemented using SciKit Learn DBScan.

See Event Clustering

Sample notebook - Event Clustering Notebook

outliers

msticpy.analysis.outliers

Similar to the eventcluster module but a little bit more experimental (read ‘less tested’). It uses SkLearn Isolation Forest to identify outlier events in a single data set or using one data set as training data and another on which to predict outliers.

Visualization

This is a collection of display and utility modules designed to make working with security data in Jupyter notebooks quicker and easier.

See Displaying/Visualizing Data

Process tree

msticpy.vis.process_tree - process tree visualization.

The process tree functionality has two main components:

  • Process Tree creation - taking a process creation log from a host and building the parent-child relationships between processes in the data set.

  • Process Tree visualization - this takes the processed output displays an interactive process tree using Bokeh plots.

There are a set of utility functions to extract individual and partial trees from the processed data set.

See ProcessTree

Sample notebook - Process Tree Visualization

Event timeline

msticpy.vis.timeline - event timeline visualization.

Display any log events on an interactive timeline. Using the Bokeh Visualization Library the timeline control enables you to visualize one or more event streams, interactively zoom into specific time slots and view event details for plotted events.

See Event Timeline

Sample notebook - Event Timeline Visualization

Notebook widgets

msticpy.nbwidgets

Common functionality such as list pickers, time boundary settings, saving and retrieving environment variables into a single line callable command.

See Notebook Widgets

Sample notebook - Event Clustering Notebook

Utility Functions

base64unpack

msticpy.transform.base64unpack

Base64 and archive (gz, zip, tar) extractor. Input can either be a single string or a specified column of a pandas dataframe. It will try to identify any base64 encoded strings and decode them. If the result looks like one of the supported archive types it will unpack the contents. The results of each decode/unpack are rechecked for further base64 content and will recurse down up to 20 levels (default can be overridden). Output is to a decoded string (for single string input) or a DataFrame (for dataframe input).

See Base64 Decoding and Unpacking

Sample notebook - Base64Unpack Usage Notebook

iocextract

msticpy.transform.iocextract

Uses a set of builtin regular expressions to look for Indicator of Compromise (IoC) patterns. Input can be a single string or a pandas dataframe with one or more columns specified as input.

The following types are built-in:

  • IPv4 and IPv6

  • URL

  • DNS domain

  • Hashes (MD5, SHA1, SHA256)

  • Windows file paths

  • Linux file paths (this is kind of noisy because a legal linux file path can have almost any character) You can modify or add to the regular expressions used at runtime.

Output is a dictionary of matches (for single string input) or a DataFrame (for dataframe input).

See IoC Extraction

Sample notebook - IoCExtract Usage Notebook

auditdextract

msticpy.transform.auditdextract

Module to load and decode Linux audit logs. It collapses messages sharing the same message ID into single events, decodes hex-encoded data fields and performs some event-specific formatting and normalization (e.g. for process start events it will re-assemble the process command line arguments into a single string).

syslog_utils

msticpy.transform.syslog_utils

Module to support the investigation of Linux hosts through Syslog. Includes functions to create host records, cluster logon events, and identify user sessions containing suspicious activity.

cmd_line

msticpy.transform.cmd_line

Module to investigation of command line activity. Allows for the detection of known malicious commands as well as suspicious patterns of behaviour.

domain_utils

msticpy.transform.domain_utils

Module to support investigation of domain names and URLs with functions to validate a domain name and screenshot a URL.

Data Masking

msticpy.data.data_obfus

Lets you obfuscate senstive data in logs to allow sharing, presentations without compromising privacy.

See Data Masking Functions

Supported Platforms and Packages

  • msticpy is OS-independent

  • Requires Python 3.8 or later

  • See requirements.txt for more details and version requirements.