Fun Things To Do With Your Honeypot System

An anonymous reader writes "Whitedust is running an interesting article on honeypots and their uses. From the article: 'Most papers deal with the potential gains a honeypot can give you, and the proper way to monitor a honeypot. Not very many of them deal with the honeypots themselves... Honeypots can be used to ensnare and beguile potential hackers; entice them to give you more research information, and actively defend your production network."" From the article: "Once an attacker has taken all the trouble to set up shop on your honeypot, he'll probably want to see what else there is to play with. If your honeypot is like most traditional honeypots, there's not much for an attacker to do once he gets in. What you really want if for the attacker to transfer down all the other toys in his arsenal so you can have a copy as well. Giving an attacker additional targets with various operating systems and services can help him decide to give you his toys. The targets can be real, but you'll get almost as much mileage if they're simulated. A good place to start is to put a phantom private network up hung off the back of the honeypot."

Comments

Like I Have That Kind of Time

[aaronhaley]

In addition to all of the things on the network I normally have to do at the office let me set up an entire phantom network just to "jack" with hackers. Yeah, I'll get right on that.

What is Honeypot

[in2mind]

For those who dont know what a honeypot is: [From Wikipedia.]

____________________________________________
Honeypot is literally the term for a container of honey but is used in several different ways, often playing off the image of sweetness being used as a lure:

* A computer system set up as a trap for attackers; see Honeypot (computing)
* Traps designed to catch conventional criminals; see honey trap

And a fun way to get free warze.

[LWATCDR]

Just put on unpatched Win 98 box naked on the Internet and a wait. You will soon have a hard drive full of porn and warze.

Actually it sounds like fun. Throw up VMWare and a few images and you could make an enter virtual network for a hacker to go nuts over.
Add in a PDP-11 Emulator, some hacked NASA and Air Force sites, a fake database or two, some Word documents showing that the US has a secert base in the middle of the everglades.....
could be fun.
Sounds like a great Hacker DnD game. Get a bunch of people to set up these things and the game is too find out what the is going on. :)

Re:And a fun way to get free warze.

[tfried]

A place, I once worked at, had a dozen or so entirely unpatched Win98 boxes connected directly to the net - for years. And guess what? Of course I wouldn't have trusted those boxes one inch, but I've never heard of any hacking troubles with those boxes, either (ok, neither IE nor Outlook were used on those computers, but other than that, no protection at all).

Yes, Win98 may be seriously vulnerable in hundreds of ways (even though it has hardly any networking functionality), but it just isn't targetted nowadays, in my experience. Try the same thing with WinXP, and you're compromised in less than a minute.

Re:And a fun way to get free warze.

[Clovert Agent]

A place, I once worked at, had a dozen or so entirely unpatched Win98 boxes connected directly to the net - for years.

I seriously doubt it - not if you mean "in the last several years". Any unprotected box hanging directly off the net will be scanned and fingerprinted within minutes if not seconds of connecting, and exploited automatically. Botnets aren't kiddies' toys anymore: they're very professionally run and your unpatched '98 box is just grist for the mill.

About five years ago I timed scans off a dialup connection in, let's say, a hostile part of the world - average of around 20 seconds from connect to scan. It hasn't gotten any better since.

Re:And a fun way to get free warze.

[Joe U]

And if he corrects it to read:

"Thou shall not use any programming language that works on only one OS. "

Then it's a typographical error, most likely a soft-broken 'Y' key, and the joke falls apart. Making fun of someone with a broken keyboard is just mean. He might be on his way to CompUSA right now for all you know.

Now, if he corrects it to read:

"Thou shall not use a programming language that works on only one OS. "

Then it's grammatical, and the joke will hold up. The world will be safe from poor grammar. You will have fulfilled your destiny. Crush the lesser races, conquer the galaxy, unimaginable power, unlimited rice pudding...Etcetera, etcetera...

(or not)

Re:And a fun way to get free warze.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised a /.'er would recommend VMware, with XEN the clear winner in the honeypot niche. Just check out The Potemkin Honeyfarm for more info... These guys are actually able to deploy an image is less than a second and do all sorts of whacky business to delude hackers into believing they're roaming the internet freely :-)

Re:And a fun way to get free warze.

[NormalVisual]

That reminds me of a joke I heard years ago:

A new Harvard freshman was lost and looking for the library. He approached what obviously was an upperclassman, and asked "Excuse me, could you please tell me where the library is at?" The upperclassman looked down his nose at the freshman, and replied, "My good sir, here at Harvard we do *not* end our sentences with a preposition." The freshman is a bit taken aback, and rephrases his question: "Okay, could you please tell me where the library is at, asshole?"

There aren't too many grammar jokes out there, so I guess you have to take them as you can get them.

Re:Think you missed the point...

[heinousjay]

Why don't you just secure your network and you don't have to worry about it

Oh, is that all? Good to see you've boiled network security down to a single step. I'd say write a book, but it would only have one page so that's probably a waste of your time.

NASA

[wootest]

Host NASA servers? :)

a fake shell

[Per Wigren]

Something funnier (IMHO) would be to write a simple wrapper over the shell which gives crazy error messages and other things:

root@honeypot:~# whoami
I have no idea.
root@honeypot:~# ls
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
root@honeypot:~#

and so on... :)

Most people..

[dubbreak]

Most people use their honey pots for surfing the web, checking email and sometimes playing games.

Risk to others

[Anonymous Coward]

What if someone uses the trojans, etc. they install on your honeypot to launch an attack on some other site? Since your express purpose is to watch what they do, you can't claim ignorance.

Are you liable for any damages?
Are you causing problems for law enforcement or other sysadmins by helping the attacker obscure their identity?

Seems like you would need to filter outbound traffic VERY carefully. It would be almost impossible to do this without the attacker knowing -- they'd realize it was a honeypot and get the hell out of there.

Honey can lead to infant botulism

[itismike]

Sorry to do this, but I think that it is somewhat careless to assume that all new parents that might be reading Slashdot are in fact aware of the unique danger that honey presents to infants. Just in case someone comes across this and isn't aware, please look into the concerns related to infant botulism before getting the bright idea to feed your newborn some honey. Now go ahead and make the jokes - I just think that this needed to be said.

Re:Idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have so much time on your hands that you find it amusing to prattle on about common spelling errors? Or does it some how make you feel superior to spot a misused "an" and point it out to the whole world as is "see, this person is an idiot, whereas I am a superior human!". Good lord, get a life.

Errors:
1. "Somehow" is one word.
2. as is "see, this person is an idiot As is?
3. a superior human!". With the type of English that one uses in the U.S., sentence-ending punctuation is usually contained within the quotation marks and one doesn't usually use two of them in one sentence.
4. Good lord Generally, "Lord"--when used in this context--is capitalized.

Damn, it's great to have so much time on my hands so I can feel so superior!

Just one problem -

[njdj]

a fake database or two, some Word documents showing that the US has a secert base in the middle of the everglades....

You'll then get pulled in by Homeland Security and shipped to Gitmo for revealing that the US has a secret base in the middle of the Everglades.

pr0n

[Khashishi]

Just fill the honeypot with pr0n and there will be plenty for the hacker to play with.

Fun things to put on honeypots

[Animats]

• Call up a venture capitalist friend and ask for some rejected business plans for really stupid business ideas. Put them on your honeypot.
• Get some publicly available geophysical data for real oil wells, and change all the locations to somewhere else with comparable geology but no oil.
• Get some rejected porno images from people in the industry. Buy the reproduction rights. Put Digimarc watermarks on them. Wait for them to reappear elsewhere. Sue. Profit.

Consider how this one looks to a visiting non-Geek

[umbrellasd]

"Fun Things To Do With Your Honeypot System"

non-Geek: "Is this a sexual reference? I don't get it...are they talking about that weird cyber thing?"

That was my experience in late-90s as well

[billstewart]

I used to have a lab with a DSL like and a couple of quasi-honeypot machines on it. The Win95 (or was it Win98?) machine was never bothered; the RedHat 6 machine kept getting brutally attacked every week so after a few rebuilds I named it "kenny". Now, the Windows machine was partly not bothered because it wasn't doing anything interesting enough to be very vulnerable - there wasn't a web or FTP server, it wasn't sharing any disks or printers, I usually used Netscape browsers instead of IE, and if you did break in all you'd get for your trouble was a Windows machine. I had another Linux box on the network that was always running a scrolling tcpdump (AFAIK nobody ever bothered it - I had fewer services installed on it because it only had 500MB disk), and could see a variety of interesting traffic.

• One week I saw it sending lots of pings to a university in Sweden. I checked with the admin there, who said it looked like my machine had been infected with Stacheldraht DDOS client and was reporting back to an infected machine at his site, and told me how to clean it up.
• Another week the pings were to Washington University in St. Louis. I forget whether their machine had attacked mine or mine had attacked theirs, but either way it seemed appropriate since they'd probably used wuftpd to break in to my machine. Cleaned it up again.
• Another week I did a "find" looking for something under root's home directory, and found a whole ~/.something directory I didn't recognize. I did an "ls", which couldn't find that directory - they'd replaced /bin/ls, but forgot to update the date stamp on the file, and also forgot to update the date stamp on /bin/ps. "ps" was hacked to not report the processes they were running from their hidden ~/.whatever directory - but "ls" wasn't hacked to hide things in /proc :-). So I cleaned up their semi-clever little rootkit.
• After I cleaned up one of the latter two attacks, their next act was an "rm -rf /" on poor Kenny. Stupid thugs; at least they could have tried something interesting.

It's all fun and games...

[JustJake]

until someone uses your honeypot as a platform to attack someone else. Or were you thinking that bad guys never use machines under their control in this manner?

Who are these security people with so much free time that they can monitor a honeynet for hours on end and create bogus traffic to move across it in order to entertain a bored 16-year-old hacker from who knows where? Every serious professional I know is up to his eyeballs in real work.

Re:Think you missed the point...

[mcrbids]

Why don't you just secure your network and you don't have to worry about it.

In my life, I've identified a few key words that are highly accurate in ferreting out people who waste time. One of these is "paradigm". Those who wax poetic about "paradigm" are typically those who haven't bothered to figure out how things work, and are trying to convince you to do whatever it is that they think might work.

Big waste - RUN!

I've come to discover that "just" is a key word. It positively identifies those who have no idea what they're talking about. The most rediculous, inane, and useless activities I've ever seen all started with the word "just" in the job description. Like:

"Solar power is feasible - just bring down the cost of manufacturing"...

or,

"Sex is no big deal - just get a girlfriend"... (big one for many who peruse these boards)

or,

"The software works great - we just need to change a few basic assumptions..."

So, watch that word, "just". It usually fortells major catastrophe and certainly unrealistic expectations!