The Honeynet Project

We have interviewed Raffy, who is one of the teachers for the Honeynet Workshop in Dubai 10-12 of February. Raffy will give the following talk: How Big Data, Data Mining, and Visualization Enable Security Intelligence and a class on Information Visualization - Bridging the Gap Between Tufte and Firewalls"

So Marty, tell us, why did you become a security expert?

Let the "Month of the Honeynet Project Tools" begin!

The idea beyond the MoHPT is quite simple. We would be really glad to involve more and more researchers out there in our research stuff and tools. In order to encourage contributions we are proposing you to dive deep into one of the already existing Honeynet Project tool cited below and contribute with feedback, ideas, documentation and/or code.

Ghost USB Honeypot
Glastopf
Thug

Let's start the new year with a forensic challenge!

I am really pleased to announce Forensic Challenge 13 – "A Message in a Picture". The challenge has been provided by the Honeynet Project Pacific Northwest Chapter. Submission deadline is 2013, Feb 15th and we will be announcing winners around the first week of March 2013.

Happy new year and have fun!

Angelo Dell'Aera
The Honeynet Project

For the last few years, I have been participating in a Department of Homeland Security sponsored effort to develop principles and applications for the evaluation of information and communication technology (ICT) research. If you are not familiar with the Menlo Report, you can find a description in Michael Bailey, David Dittrich, Erin Kenneally, and Douglas Maughan. The Menlo Report. Security & Privacy, IEEE, 10(2):71–75, March/April 2012.

I and two of my Menlo colleagues -- Wendy Vischer and Erin Kenneally -- recently taught a didactic course at the PRIM&R Advancing Ethical Research conference in San Diego. (PRIM&R is the conference for Institutional Review Board, or IRB, professionals, with the annual AER conference having thousands of attendees). Our course primarily described the Menlo Report process to date, but we concluded with a mock IRB committee review of a fictional proposed research project in which researchers develop countermeasures to malicious botnets in social network platforms like Facebook using a combination of deception to build a social network of over 1 million users and to then use "good bots" that infiltrate the "bad bots".

Claudio has just released a new version of Cuckoo Sandbox 0.5. The list of new features is very impressive! Check it out at http://cuckoosandbox.org/2012-12-20-to-the-end-of-the-world.html.

In many countries, its the time of the year you can make tax deductible donations to support your favorite charity and non-profit organization. Id like to ask you to consider donating to the Honeynet Project this year. The Honeynet Project is a 501c3 non-profit organization (EIN: 36-4460128) that - over the past decade - learned the tools, tactics and motives involved in computer and network attacks, and shared the lessons learned with the public. Along the way, we have authored and published many open-source tools to capture & analyze attacks. If you would like to support the cause, please donate.

Happy Holidays to all of you.

Christian Seifert
CEO, The Honeynet Project

Over the last few weeks I've basically rewritten the core of Ghost, our system for USB malware detection. While the new approach promises to be much more effective, it has a drawback: It only works for Windows Vista and later systems. As a consequence, there are now two flavors of Ghost in existence: One supports Windows XP but won't receive much further development, whereas a lot of interesting new features will be implemented for the other one, which is dedicated to Vista and later. In this post, I'm going to explain the reasoning behind the decision, describe the recent technical advances and outline some of our plans for the future.

This is a response to a CSO Online blog post by Jeff Bardin ("Caution: Not Executing Offensive Actions Against Our Adversaries is High Risk," November 2012.), which is a rebuttal to a blog post by Jody Westby on Forbes online (“Caution: Active Response to Cyber Attacks Has High Risk.”) Mr. Bardin is obviously playing on words in the title and I seriously doubt he believes that it is higher risk to not take aggressive actions than is to do so. His post does not contain a reasoned proposal for how to change or work within existing legal and ethical norms to allow aggressive actions directed at computer network attackers. It is instead a strident endorsement of a vaguely defined "new approach" of counter-attack using simplistic arguments based on emotion and a desire for retribution (an unethical position to take), lacking sufficient discussion of appropriate "rules of engagement," principle-based ethical justifications of any type beyond basic "right of self-defense" arguments, and including no oversight mechanisms to minimize the potential for abuse or collateral damage. This response is quite long, including not only Mr. Bardin's own words for context but also many references to materials apropos to the topic that Mr. Bardin does not provide in his post.

Mr. Bardin's blog post illustrates some of the problems with discussion of this topic that I have seen over and over since the first workshops I attended or lead on this topic in Seattle's Agora security group from 2001 to 2004. I have been studying and discussing these issues for over a decade and have seen the same simplistic arguments repeated in nearly every discussion. Useful analogies in this realm are really hard to find and almost always fail. Part of the problem stems from non-technical people trying to discuss extremely technical and complex issues of computer network attack and defense, combined with rushing to simple "self defense" analogies and appeals to emotion, suggesting we have to do something, anything, to get satisfaction. Frequently left out is any meaningful discussion of ethics, "rules of engagement," responsibility, or accountability.

If my response here comes across as vehement opposition, it is not intended that way. If anything, it shares Mr. Bardin's frustration that we have gotten to the point where intrusions are so widespread and pervasive, but we differ in explaining why and in proposing a viable path forward.