That’s right, no development release this time around. I’ve been trying to get version 0.5 all finished for the Hex 1.0.3 release, and I’m happy to present the newest NSM-Console release!

Firstly, you can download NSM-Console version 0.5 here:
http://writequit.org/projects/nsm-console/files/nsm-console-0.5.tar.gz

Mirror here:
https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/dakrone/files/nsm-console-0.5.tar.gz

Like always, let’s go over some of the new features in this release:

Alias command
You can now alias a command whatever else you would like to, the syntax is the same as regular bash alias syntax, for instance, here are my aliases from my ~/.nsmcrc:
alias ls = list
alias ll = list
alias serv = e cat /etc/services | grep
So as an example, if I wanted to look up a service port, now I just type “serv 5190” and see if /etc/services has an entry for that port. (I have a habit of hitting ‘ll’ or ‘ls’ all the time, so now at least they’re useful)

Additional modules: flowtime and harimau
I added a couple of modules, the first is flowtime, which is a packet timeliner that I wrote about in this post. The second is the Harimau module, which will query the Harimau watchlist for all the IPs in a pcap file and print out the matching entries. Thanks go to Spoonfork and the Security.org.my team for the awesome tool.
Note: flowtime won’t work out of the box in Hex unless you install Argus version 3 (not version 2, which is what Hex comes with) as well as symlink ‘ploticus’ to ‘pl’ somewhere in your path.

Checkip command
Speaking of the Harimau watchlist, it has also been integrated as an NSM-Console command. You can see an example here:
nsm> checkip 209.177.146.34
209.177.146.34,www.emergingthreats.net/rules/bleeding-botcc.rules,botcc,2008-02-05 00:03:10

Module improvements
The snort module now uses the ac-bnfa search algorithm, which should help on systems with lower amounts of RAM (*cough* like my own). In addition, the bro-ids module now actually generates many more helpful reports and actually performs intrusion detection instead of just generating flow content. Some modules have been added to categories to make them easier to toggle.

Other minor improvements
Toggle handles multiple module names, space separated
All NSM-Console errors finally go to STDERR instead of STDOUT
Help command is much more readable and supports argument to get help about a particular command.
~./nsmcrc is read extremely quietly now, so it doesn’t fill up the screen
Bugfixes.

You can read the entire changelog here.

As always, please please please let me know if you have any comments, criticisms or suggestions Feel free to email me or leave a comment below.