The Honeynet Project

Today I've released version 0.3 of the Ghost USB honeypot, which introduces a lot of new features, including a completely rewritten core for better malware detection. The new version is available on the project page. This post outlines the major changes.

On March 4, 2013, a contest was held at the Nullcon conference in Goa, India, to see who could take over a botnet. The Times of India reported that the prize money was provided by an Indian government official and was awarded to the Garage4Hackers team. The co-founder of the Nullcon conference, Antriksh Shah, said "At Nullcon Goa 2013, for the first time in the world the government has come forward and announced a bounty prize of Rs 35,000 to whoever provides critical information on the command and control servers of a malware recently found in one of the government installations in India," and then tweeted, "Dawn of new infosec era. Govt of India announced (and actually paid) first ever bounty (Rs. 35 k) at nullcon to take down a c&c." When asked whether this was a live botnet, or a simulated botnet held within a safe and isolated virtual network where no harm could result, Nullcon tweeted, "it was a live campaign up since a couple of yrs and the malware was found in a gov. Infra."

Like many other open source organizations, The Honeynet Project's members have been excitedly waiting to hear if Google would be running their Google Summer of Code (GSoC) initiative again this year. Well, the wait the over and GSoC 2013 has officially been announced on Google's Open Source Blog. This is great news!

Taking a look at the first submissions, it seems like more time is needed in order to solve the Forensic Challenge 13 - "A Message In A Picture". For this reason we decided to extend the submission deadline to 2013, March 15th.

Have fun!

Angelo Dell'Aera
The Honeynet Project

The broader picture a the conference will be given by a well known person in this field. He will talk about "Security 2020" This is Dr. Anton Chuvakin, and he is a Research Director at Gartner's Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) Security and Risk Management Strategies team in his day job.

We have finally gotten an interview with Mark Schloesser. This is the guy that does not say too much, but delivers as hell. “Less talk more code” could easily describe him. He will take you through Configuring an Environment for Threat Assessment This is building a functional and centralized threat intelligence framework! We are really looking forward to this workshop!

Tell us Mark, why did you become a security expert?

We have interviewed Mahmud ab Rahman, who currently works as an Information Security Specialist for Malaysia Computer Emergency and Response Team (MyCERT) under the umbrella of CyberSecurity Malaysia. His areas of focus are network security,botnet monitoring, and malware analysis.

Ready for the Honeynet Project Meeting in February, we are pleased to announce our second release of HoneyProxy!

Started as a Google Summer of Code 2012 project, HoneyProxy is a lightweight tool that allows live HTTP and HTTPS traffic inspection and analysis. This release features a new Report Editor which allows you to analyze your flows, aggregate data or search for anomalies in your traffic dumps.

We have interviewed Felix Leder, who works as an innovation and new technology architect for Norman ASA. He has has presented classes around the world on malware analysis, reverse engineering, and anti-botnet approaches.