Ongoing Malcolm development will aim to provide additional parsers for common ICS protocols.Īlthough all of the open source tools which make up Malcolm are already available and in general use, Malcolm provides a framework of interconnectivity which makes it greater than the sum of its parts.

Expanding control systems visibility – While Malcolm is great for general-purpose network traffic analysis, its creators see a particular need in the community for tools providing insight into protocols used in industrial control systems (ICS) environments.

Permissive license – Malcolm is comprised of several widely used open source tools, making it an attractive alternative to security solutions requiring paid licenses.

Secure communications – All communications with Malcolm, both from the user interface and from remote log forwarders, are secured with industry standard encryption protocols.

This Docker-based deployment model, combined with a few simple scripts for setup and run-time management, makes Malcolm suitable to be deployed quickly across a variety of platforms and use cases, whether it be for long-term deployment on a Linux server in a security operations center (SOC) or for incident response on a Macbook for an individual engagement.

Streamlined deployment – Malcolm operates as a cluster of Docker containers, isolated sandboxes which each serve a dedicated function of the system.

Powerful traffic analysis – Visibility into network communications is provided through two intuitive interfaces: OpenSearch Dashboards, a flexible data visualization plugin with dozens of prebuilt dashboards providing an at-a-glance overview of network protocols and Arkime (formerly Moloch), a powerful tool for finding and identifying the network sessions comprising suspected security incidents.

In either case, the data is automatically normalized, enriched, and correlated for analysis. These artifacts can be uploaded via a simple browser-based interface or captured live and forwarded to Malcolm using lightweight forwarders.

Easy to use – Malcolm accepts network traffic data in the form of full packet capture (PCAP) files and Zeek (formerly Bro) logs.Malcolm is a powerful network traffic analysis tool suite designed with the following goals in mind:

A powerful, easily deployable network traffic analysis tool suite

Traffic analysis software