Honeynets: Trapping attackers and naming names

The Web Honeynet Project, an independent group of Honeynet researchers from Securiteam and the ITOSF have decided to launch web application honeynets with a new twist. The twist is, they plan to name not only the attack details, as is usual, but also to divulge the IP addresses and other tracking information about the attackers themselves.

This approach is not unheard of, as lists of known high-volume attackers have been circulating through the Net for several years, but this is the first time someone has applied the honeynet concept to making attacker IP data publicly known, as far as I know. The team claims that attackers are now compromising web servers for defacement and bot-net activity on a wide scale. They hope to lower the impact of these assaults and help organizations and individuals protect themselves from known attacker IPs.

The project claims that the primary focus of these attackers has been Windows and Linux servers, and that the compromises are largely performed through PHP vulnerabilities that have been commonly known for some time. This fits the usual pattern of large-scale bot-net activity, only this time instead of targeting end-user systems with known weaknesses, the targets are web servers around the world. In the past, huge bot-net infestations have been identified where the compromises were linked to known security issues, some as old as 1998!

Hopefully, the Web Honeynet Project will find an effective means of communicating and managing their data so that they can create a useful list of current attackers that organizations can add to their security systems in an automated fashion. At the very least, maybe the release of tracking and identity data will shame attackers into curbing their behavior, though that seems highly unlikely in most cases.

Honeynets and honeypots are proving to be an interesting technology that many organizations and individuals seem to be embracing. If we are to move forward as infosec practitioners and better protect our assets in an ever more hostile cyber world, we must come to terms with understanding attackers, their techniques and their behaviors. These tools may be the key to that insight, and the Honeynet Projects are a great resource for getting started.

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, my company, MicroSolved, Inc. sells a honeypot solution that we have created for organizations of various sizes.