Moloch – Open-Source Large Scale Indexed Packet Capture and Search System | Hacker News Reader

Moloch – Open-Source Large Scale Indexed Packet Capture and Search System

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58 pointsrosaliebee28 comments

I suppose verizon is the right entity to choose to name something this, but really: What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Can we salt the earth after they're gone, too?

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!

https://github.com/aol/moloch

Comes from AOL. So indeed an ancient and powerful god. The only caveat is to get it to do anything you have to poses a magic artifact - an original AOL free trial CD.

But in all seriousness I remember trying it out years ago and it worked pretty well. It ended put a bit too complex for what we needed, but I remember being impressed by it.

Presumably, what anybody sees is passed through a firewall to Moloch?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch

Yeah, what's up with this name? It puts me off immediately knowing of Moloch. Was everyone at Yahoo okay with this name as they worked on it? It seems so strange of a choice.

You have no sense of humor, I guess. I love it.

It's not a joke, it's just a name, so humor has nothing to do with it. The problem is that it's a weird choice of name. If someone named it "Hitler" or "Damnation" or "PoopEmoji" it would also be a bad name, but those would also not be jokes, just bad names.

Sorry, you're wrong. It's a funny name. Get over it.

What makes it funny? I'm serious, I actually don't get it.

Have you tried Googling it?

In the Old Testament, Moloch was another tribe's god, and so was a competitor to Yahweh (the Jewish/Christian/Muslim god). The OT doesn't actually say there aren't other gods, but rather that you should only worship Yahweh. The OT describes Yahweh as one god among many others, although he does get credit for creation to make him seem stronger than those other gods. That eventually morphed into the notion that there were no other gods at all, many centuries later, and those competing gods got grandfathered in to being thought of as demons and devils within the framework of monotheistic Christianity (not sure about their role in Judaism). In a similar way, pagan gods got grandfathered in to being Christian saints in many cases, and pagan holidays turned into Christian holidays.

So: Moloch is a demon, according to Christianity. And I'm guessing the software involves a daemon process? So...yeah. Real clever. That's some really sophisticated humor there. Waka waka waka!

Can a name not be chosen in jest?

The hacker group on Secret, Strange, and True (TechTV series) was named Moloch. First time I heard of it. I don't know how much of that show was real or for show, though.

Yep. That reminds me, there's a major piece of OpenMPI called "schizo" that supports "multiple personalities" of runtime environment. I don't know how they got away with that one...

Like the computer security program named SATAN, I suppose.

Maybe the name comes from Polish language, where lowercase "moloch" simply means something gigantic, especially a structure.

Except they also have owl imagery all over the website, which AFAIK has no connection to the historical Canaanite god, but does have a connection to modern conspiracy theorists' reimagining of Moloch.

I currently use this at work (DoD entity) as our full packet capture solution. Love it and am super happy with the features it has. Interestingly, it's an AOL product (or was? Last I checked). Wasn't aware those guys still do stuff.

I know someone who works for one of the older ISPs like AOL. They still have millions of dialup customers.

I believe AOL still has a few million still on dialup.

A lot of those connections are backup lines for retail stores to process credit cards if their standard connection goes offline

Fun fact, Moloch's initial development was funded by DARPA Cyber Fast Track! Glad to hear it's working out for people in DOD.

Very cool! I wonder if that played in to the USAF's selection of it for our defensive cyber platform.

Just FYI, CuckooSandbox has good integration with this,which is nice when you want to find undiscovered badness in your environment that talks to similar network entities as your sandbox detonation.

I wouldn't want to run this solely based on the fact that they wrote a tremendous amount of parsers in C. Even worse, it also seems they wrote them by hand and didn't use a parser generator. This is really not what you should be doing in 2012-2019.

I ran this on our edge and was really impressed. It's a great product -- install and running can happen fast, results are good. Kudos!

I thought this is about Moloch DAO, the Ethereum-based group.

I also thought this. Moloch is a very big deal in the Ethereum space.

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