User Guides

Security Information Exchange (SIE) Phishing URLs

Channel 27 data includes URLs, the targeted brand (banking, social media, etc.), and other information related to malicious sites associated with phishing campaigns. Phishing is an attempt to convince a victim or victims into divulging personally identifiable information (PII), credit card or banking information, login details for accounts, passwords, or other sensitive information. Phishing messages often attempt to convince the targeted victim to visit a web-based phishing site that impersonates a legitimate brand or service so you will disclose sensitive information.

Intelligence from channel 27 enables you to:

  • Identify phishing attempts and implement appropriate controls to block the threat
  • Enables ISPs to identify and inform customers that their system needs remediation because it is infected and hosting a phishing site or sites
  • Can be used by law enforcement agencies (LEAs) to find evidence of phishing sites; relevant for justifying warrants or subpoenas, and for evidence in a prosecution

Farsight partners with PhishLabs for the data available from channel 27, where analysts review and verify information before sharing with SIE. This analysis process may cause a delay before the data is available on channel 27. Data from channel 27 is pre-processed, so it does not include the raw message. However, it will contain the relevant URLs needed to identify the phishing threat.

PhishLabs uses a diverse set of intelligence sources and reports from abuse teams to determine which URLs are malicious.

About Security Information Exchange (SIE)

The Security Information Exchange (SIE), from Farsight Security® Inc. (now a part of DomainTools), is a scalable and adaptable real-time data streaming and information sharing platform. SIE collects and provides access to more than 200,000 observations per-second of raw data from its global sensor network. Farsight also applies unique and proprietary methods for improving usability of the data, directly sharing the refined intelligence with SIE customers and DNSDB®, one of the world’s largest passive DNS (pDNS) databases.

The diverse set of data available from SIE includes the following and is relevant and useful for practitioners in various technology roles:

  • Raw and processed passive DNS data
  • Darknet/darkspace telescope data
  • SPAM sources and URLs
  • Phishing URLs and associated targeted brands
  • Connection attempts from malware-infected systems (as seen by a sinkhole)
  • Network traffic blocked by Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and firewall devices

Each unique set of data in SIE is known as a channel and the data acquired from a specific channel can be customized to meet the needs of each customer, enabling you to subscribe to and access only the channels needed to solve your problem. A channel in SIE may be the result from analyzing the data or a subset of data from other channels.

Data Format for SIE Phishing URLs

Channel NamePhishing URLs
DescriptionPhishLabs data for malicious sites involved in phishing campaigns
Channel Number27

To see current channel traffic volumes and service options for accessing it, please see the Security Information Exchange (SIE) Channel Guide.

Using Phishing URLs Data

A sample Phishing URLs record looks like this:

{"time":"2021-09-28 21:58:26.634481906"
    ,"vname":"base",
    "mname":"encode",
    "source":"a1ba02cf",
    "message":
    {
    "type":"JSON", "payload":"eyJyZXBvcnRlZF91cmwiOiJodHRwczovL2FwcGxlLXVwZGF0ZS1hY2Nlc3NpZC5zZXJ2ZWh0dC5zd2Zjby5jb20uc2EvIiwiZG9tYWluX21hbGljaW91cyI6IjAiLCJmYWxzZXBvc2l0aXZlIjoiMCIsInVybF90eXBlIjoiUGhpc2hpbmcgcmVkaXJlY3QiLCJpcF9hZGRyZXNzZXMiOiIyMTIuNzYuODUuNzIiLCJzaHV0ZG93bl90aW1lIjoiMDAwMC0wMC0wMCAwMDowMDowMCIsImRvbWFpbiI6InN3ZmNvLmNvbS5zYSIsIm5vcm1hbGl6ZWRfdXJsIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly9hcHBsZS11cGRhdGUtYWNjZXNzaWQuc2VydmVodHQuc3dmY28uY29tLnNhLyIsImRldGVjdGVkX3RpbWUiOiIyMDIxLTA5LTI4IDIxOjUzOjUzIiwidGFyZ2V0X2JyYW5kIjoiQXBwbGUgSUQifQ=="
    }
}

When you decode the payload with uudecode, you get a data set that looks something like this:

{
    "reported_url":"https://apple-update-accessid.servehtt.swfco.com.sa/",
    "domain_malicious":"0",
    "falsepositive":"0",
    "url_type":"Phishing redirect",
    "ip_addresses":"212.76.85.72",
    "shutdown_time":"0000-00-00 00:00:00",
    "domain":"swfco.com.sa",
    "normalized_url":"https://apple-update-accessid.servehtt.swfco.com.sa/",
    "detected_time":"2021-09-28 21:53:53",
    "target_brand":"Apple ID"
}

SIE Access Methods

Data from SIE can be accessed and acquired using the following methods:

  • Direct Connect: Connect a system to the SIE network. This 1.) requires a server to be installed in a data center where Farsight has a point of presence, and 2.) then ordering a network cross connect between your server and the SIE network. Customers can optionally, and prefer to, lease a blade server from Farsight
  • SIE Remote Access (SRA): Remotely connect to the SIE network using an encrypted tunnel from your workstation or a server in your local data center
  • SIE Batch: Provides on-demand access for downloading data from SIE channels using a RESTful API or web-based interface. You select the channel and duration of time you are interested in, and then download the data for analysis. The duration of available data is dependent on the channel, but typically the most recent 12-18 hours

For additional information about SIE access methods, please see the SIE Technical Overview document.

Direct Connect

SIE Direct Connect allows a customer to physically connect a server to the Farsight SIE network for maximum data throughput. This can be done in one of two ways:

  • Blade Server: Pre-configured blade servers co-located in one of Farsight’s data centers that can be leased by customers for direct access to SIE channels
  • Customer Server: Customer (owned, managed, and operated) servers that can be installed in one of Farsight’s data centers and physically connected to the SIE network with a network cross-connect

If a blade server is leased from Farsight, it will be pre-installed with the essential software components needed to acquire, process, compress, buffer, and transfer data from SIE channels to the customer’s data center for additional analysis, enrichment, and storage.

If a customer uses their own server, an order can be submitted for a cross-connect to the SIE switches hosted at select Equinix data centers (Ashburn DC3 and Palo Alto SV8). An FSI account manager can help guide cross-connect provisioning details, hosting, or colocation options.

For additional information about SIE connection methods, please see the SIE Technical Overview document. A Farsight’s sales representatives is happy to share a copy of this document with you. This will help inform and guide you in understanding which connection method will work best for you.

SIE Remote Access (SRA)

SIE Remote Access (SRA) enables a customer to remotely connect to the Security Information Exchange (SIE) from anywhere on the Internet. SRA provides access to SIE channel data on customer’s local servers, allowing their analysis and processing systems to be located in their own data centers rather than physically co-located at a Farsight’s data center.

Due to the technical limitations of transporting high bitrate SIE channels across the Internet, the SRA access method is not available for all SIE channels. Please reference the SIE Channel Guide for channels that can be accessed using SRA.

SRA uses the Advanced Exchange Access (AXA) transport protocol which enables SRA sessions to perform the following:

  • Select which SIE channel or channels to monitor and acquire data from
  • Define user-specified search or filtering criteria to match IP or DNS traffic
  • Control rate-limits and other AXA parameters

The streaming search and filtering capabilities of AXA enables SRA to access and acquire meaningful and relevant data from SIE while avoiding the costs of transporting enormous volumes of data across the Internet.

Note: For high volume channels accessed using SRA, it is expected that customer’s will specify a search or filter for IP addresses and DNS domain names or hostnames of interest. The SRA service will only collect and send data matching the specified criteria across the Internet to the customer.

SIE Batch

SIE Batch provides on-demand access for downloading data from SIE channels using a RESTful API or web-based interface. You select the channel and duration of time you are interested in, and then download the data for analysis. The duration of available data is dependent on the channel, but is typically the most recent 12-18 hours. SIE Batch allows you to acquire data from SIE channel using two (2) methods:

  • API: Allows you to write tools to programmatically download data from SIE channels for analysis.
  • Interactively: Web-based interface to the API that enables you to select and download SIE channel data on-demand.

Advanced Exchange Access Middleware Daemon (AXAMD)

Farsight also provides a RESTful middleware layer in front of its AXA service. This service is called the AXA Middleware Daemon (AXAMD) and provides a RESTful capability that adds a streaming HTTP interface on top of the AXA toolkit. This enables web-application developers to interface with SIE using SRA. Farsight also published a command line tool and Python extension library called axamd_client. This toolkit is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

The Advanced Exchange Access (AXA) toolkit contains tools and a C library to bring Farsight’s real-time data and services directly from the Farsight Security Information Exchange (SIE) to the customers network.

Advanced Exchange Access Middleware Daemon (AXAMD) is a suite of tools and library code to bring Farsight’s real-time data and services directly from the Farsight Security Information Exchange (SIE) to the customers network.

Due to the technical limitations of transporting high bitrate SIE channels across the Internet, the AXAMD access method is not available for all SIE channels.

Additional Information