Why We Created IP Geo Destination
If you’ve ever heard our founder and CEO, Andrew Morris, speak, you’ll know that one of the core reasons GreyNoise exists is to answer the question “Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me?”
GreyNoise provides details about opportunistic scan activity by source IP as observed across our sensor network. When large geopolitical events happen, like the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, our research team historically has been able to provide details on the destination of the traffic we’re seeing as well (e.g. Russian scans and exploitation attempts only focusing on our Ukrainian sensors). We are proud to share that this capability, labeled as IP Geo Destination, is now available to all GreyNoise customers via the Visualizer and API endpoints as of today.
What IP Geo Destination Can Show You
Using the new IP Geo Destination feature, we can delve deeper into anomalies in scanning traffic.
Multi-Destination Results
Recently, there has been an uptick in scan activity related to scanning for DB2 databases as highlighted by the trends page. Using this as a starting point organizations can begin to investigate further to better understand why there is a sudden increase in scan activity.
Using the GreyNoise command line tool, we can search ‘.metadata.destination_countries’ to derive where this activity is pointing to. The traffic seen from the DB2 Scanner in the last 7 days reveals an even distribution of traffic across GreyNoise sensors in 41 different countries (see our docs for a list of all countries where we have sensors today).
Further investigating IPs active in the last seven days that are scanning for DB2 instances shows that all of them have been tagged as malicious in GreyNoise. Most of them have multiple tags associated with each IP address, several of which are related to various worms attempting to propagate across the systems connected to the internet.
Single Destination Results
Threat hunters looking for more targeted activity can add the `single_destination` parameter to identify IPs focusing on a particular geographic region.
In the example above, by entering the search `tags:"DB2 Scanner" destination_country:Ukraine single_destination:true `, you can filter results to show only activity that is targeting a single country, in this case, Ukraine. Defenders that work for the government, non-profit organizations, or are generally interested in a specific country or region can utilize this to focus on localized activities and potential threats.
----
With the additional data provided by IP Geo Destination, GreyNoise users can better understand how attacks impact different geographic regions. Our destination data is built off of our own sensor network so the geographic information being provided is first-hand. This feature is designed for cyber defenders to connect geopolitical motivations with scan and attack traffic and help responders quickly prioritize and triage alerts.
If you have questions about this feature or are interested in getting a demo contact our sales team.
.png)
