Cont3xt

Cont3xt centralizes and simplifies a structured approach to gathering contextual intelligence in support of technical investigations. It enriches indicators using popular commercial and OSINT sources in a structured, consistent, and thorough process. Some of the default enrichment integrations include PassiveTotal, VirusTotal, Censys, Shodan, and more. Simplify your analytic life!

Additionally, you can build custom links to any public/private web resource where the web application supports query string deep linking. This makes it easy to pivot investigations to other sources.

Cont3xt was first available in the Arkime 4.0 release.

The Problem

  • Do you hate popping loads of browser tabs into many different services to research technical indicators, like I used to do?
  • Are you inconsistent with your use of available research tools, like I used to be?
  • Do you wish you could easily pivot into other web accessible investigative resources, like I used to wish?

Introducing Cont3xt

Cont3xt automates the task of gathering contextual intelligence from a handful of popular services. Cont3xt will auto enrich supported indicator types of IP, domain/hostname, URL, email address, hash or phone number.

Enter an indicator in the search bar. The search bar supports refanging input and identifies the indicator type. Search does not currently support bulk lookups, but will in the future.

You can add custom link to query your available resources that will simplify team access to frequently queried resources.

Share links with team mates that are tailored to specific views and link filters to guide the investigative process.

Export full reports, or subsets of response data.

Auto Enrichments:

We currently support a bunch of different services for auto enrichments, and are adding new ones all the time.

Domains/Hostnames:

  1. Use of Cloudflare DNS over HTTPS to perform resolution of records types including A, AAAA, NS, MX, TXT, SPF/DMARC, CAA and SOA. Any explicit IP’s resolved will have the IP iType enrichment performed.
  2. Direct/Public Whois request. This can be valuable over other third party commercial services which will offer results, but may be cached or not current when dealing with freshly registered domains.
  3. PassiveTotal Whois
  4. PassiveTotal PDNS
  5. PassiveTotal subdomains
  6. BuiltWith
  7. URLHaus
  8. URLScan ‘contains’
  9. VirusTotal ‘contains’
  10. AlienVault OTX
  11. Anomali ThreatStream search

IPs:

  1. RDAP query identifying RIR, and link to detail.
  2. SPUR.us
  3. GreyNoise
  4. Censys
  5. AbuseIPDB
  6. Shodan
  7. PassiveTotal PDNS
  8. BGPView
  9. ThreatFox
  10. URLHaus
  11. URLScan
  12. VirusTotal
  13. AlienVault OTX
  14. Anomali ThreatStream

Email:

  1. Perform a direct connection SMTP sender receipt verification. This is the only heavy touch that cont3xt currently performs. You can disable this in integrations.
  2. Anomali ThreatStream
  3. Extract the base domain, and perform all relevant Domain enrichments.

Hashes:

  1. MalwareBazaar
  2. ThreatFox
  3. VirusTotal
  4. AlienVault OTX
  5. Anomali ThreatStream

Phone Numbers (U.S only):

  1. Twilio - identify carrier and caller name

Installation

  1. Configure OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, if only using for Cont3xt a small single node deployment is enough
  2. Download Arkime 4.0 or later
  3. Install the RPM/DEB file
  4. Run /opt/arkime/bin/Configure --cont3xt to enable systemd file
  5. If a NEW install, run /opt/arkime/db/db.pl http://eshost:port init
  6. Edit /opt/arkime/etc/cont3xt.ini and update elasticsearch setting
  7. If a NEW install, run /opt/arkime/bin/arkime_add_user.sh admin admin PASSWORD --admin to create an initial user
  8. Run systemctl restart arkimecont3xt

cont3xt.js

You’ll need to run cont3xt.js from the cont3xt directory.

If not using anonymous mode, every user will need either the cont3xtUser or cont3xtAdmin role assigned to them. The cont3xtAdmin role will allow the user to edit any link group.

Settings

By default, settings live in a config.ini file. There are two types of settings that you may need to change: Settings with the cont3xt service itself and settings with the integrations. It is assumed that each user of Cont3xt will set up their own integration users/keys but it is possible to have global keys.

General

Create a [cont3xt] section

Setting Default Description
cacheTimeout 1h How long to cache results for integrations, can be overridden, can be overriden per intergration
cachePolicy shared Can be shared or user, if set to user then the cache is per user, can be overriden per intergration
port 3218 The port that the cont3xt service listens on
cont3xtHost empty What hostname to bind to
hstsHeader false Set the hsts header on requests to cont3xt
webBasePath / The base url for Cont3xt web requests. Must end with a / or bad things will happen.
certFile empty Public certificate to use for https, if not set then http will be used. keyFile must also be set.
keyFile empty Private certificate to use for https, if not set then http will be used. certFile must also be set.
userNameHeader anonymous Header to use for determining the username to check in the database for instead of using http digest. Set to digest to use http digest authentication.
userAgent cont3xt The http user-agent header to use when talking to remote services
geoLite2ASN   settings page
geoLite2Country   settings page

DB Settings

These also live in the [cont3xt] section.

Setting Default Description
dbUrl empty Either lmdb:DIRECTORY or an OpenSearch/Elasticsearch URL for storing cont3xt data.
elasticsearch http://localhost:9200 The OpenSearch/Elasticsearch URL to use, dbUrl overrides this setting
elasticsearchAPIKey empty See settings page
elasticsearchBasicAuth empty See settings page
elasticsearchTimeout 300 See settings page
esClientKey empty See settings page
esClientCert empty See settings page
esClientKeyPass empty See settings page
usersUrl empty Either lmdb:DIRECTORY or an OpenSearch/Elasticsearch URL for storing cont3xt users database. Can be the same that all Arkime tools use.
usersElasticsearch empty See settings page
usersPrefix empty See settings page
usersElasticsearchAPIKey empty See settings page
usersElasticsearchBasicAuth empty See settings page
passwordSecret password See settings page

Caching

Cont3xt can cache integration queries to speed up results and to lower the load on the integration services.

Create a [cache] section

Setting Default Description
type memory memory, redis, memcached, lmdb are supported. lmdb is recommend for a local disk cache and redis for a cached shared.
redisURL empty Format is redis://[:password@]host:port/db-number, redis-sentinel://[[sentinelPassword]:[password]@]host[:port]/redis-name/db-number, or redis-cluster://[:password@]host:port/db-number
memcachedURL empty Format is memcached://[user:pass@]server1[:11211],[user:pass@]server2[:11211],...
lmdbDir empty Path where to create the lmdb cache directory
cacheSize 100000 Maximum number of results to cache in memory, used for all but lmdb
cacheTimeout 24 hours In seconds the MAX time to cache any item, used by redis/memcachd

Common settings per integration

Every integration can have its own settings with keys, passwords and other things. Usually keys and passwords should be set per user in the UI, which will override these.

In each [integrationname] section

Setting Default Description
disabled false If set to true users can NOT use this integration
cacheTimeout cont3xt.cacheTimeout How long to cache results for this integration
cachePolicy cont3xt.cachePolicy Can be shared or user, if set to user then the cache is per user

Sample Configs

Possible configurations for cont3xt

Using OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

It is possible to setup cont3xt in the Arkime universe.

[cont3xt]
# Where all the cont3xt data is stored
elasticsearch=https://ESHOST1:9200,https://ESHOST2:9200

# Where the user database is. This might be the same as above
usersElasticsearch=https://USERESHOST1:9200,https://USERESHOST2:9200

# If using SSO uncomment below with the http header with the username in it
#userNameHeader=moloch_user

# default cache timeout
cacheTimeout=1d

# Configure local disk cache
[cache]
type=lmdb
lmdbDir=/opt/arkime/cont3xt-cache

##### INTEGRATION SETTINGS

[Threatstream]
# For threatstream we don't share the cache, it is per user
cachePolicy=user
#host=threatstreamonprem.host

[VirusTotal]
# For VT lets increase the timeout
cacheTimeout=1w

Using standalone

It is possible to setup cont3xt in a standalone deployment without OpenSearch/Elasticsearch. You will need to use the addUser script with the cont3xt.ini configuration file to add users.

[cont3xt]
# Where all the cont3xt data is stored
dbUrl=lmdb:///opt/arkime/cont3xt-db

# Where the user database is. This should be different than above
usersUrl=lmdb:///opt/arkime/cont3xt-users

# If using SSO uncomment below with the http header with the username in it
#userNameHeader=moloch_user

# default cache timeout
cacheTimeout=1d

# Configure local disk cache
[cache]
type=lmdb
lmdbDir=/opt/arkime/cont3xt-cache

##### INTEGRATION SETTINGS

[Threatstream]
# For threatstream we don't share the cache, it is per user
cachePolicy=user
#host=threatstreamonprem.host

[VirusTotal]
# For VT lets increase the timeout
cacheTimeout=1w

Known Issues

  • This document needs to be improved
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