Deutsche Telekom Give Their Views on the Hottest Topics at Honeynet Project Workshop 2015

This year, the annual Honeynet Project Workshop 2015 event will be sponsored by Deutsche Telekom. In anticipation of the event, we did an exclusive interview with André Vorbach (IT-Security Expert) and Markus Schmall (Vice President IT Security) to find out how Deutsche Telekom is getting involved and what they see as the hot topics at this year’s workshop.

HNP: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview with us today. So, how important is an event like the Honeynet Project Workshop for knowledge sharing and growing your global network in the IT sector?

André: The workshop provides a great opportunity to meet people that are deeply involved in honeypot development and security research. We see this conference as an addition to other security conferences and in general as a very good discussion / knowledge sharing platform. It is a great place to get in touch and stay in contact with other developers and work on new ideas.

NHP: What briefings and workshops will be most valuable to attend for you and your IT experts?

Markus: Many of this year’s topics are interesting. Besides the Android-related topics, we are also looking forward to the SS7/LTE-related briefings. Further, we are looking forward to having in-depth discussions with developers from The Honeynet Project, for example of such interesting projects as Conpot.

HNP: Anything else to add to this for more technical and interesting questions that will excite and interest the IT experts reading this interview?

André: We are currently working on a combined “honeypot platform” and plan to preview it around Cebit exhibition in March. Basically, we offer all the tooling to generate easy-to-deploy honeypot ISO images, based around dockerized honeypots such as kippo, dionaea, glastopf and honeytrap, for example. The data captured can be contributed to the Honeynet Project community via HPFeeds and also to a community backend of Deutsche Telekom. The idea is to make the deployment of sensors as well as the sharing of honeypot data as easy as possible. And we combine many tools from THP.

HNP: What benefits does Deutsche Telekom see in Honeypots?

André: We see honeypots as a very good addition to our protection landscape. The honeypot data for example is used to identify infected customer computers and finally to inform customers about their infections. We truly believe in this approach to help out customers.

Markus: Additionally, we feed the data into our security dashboard (www.sicherheitstacho.eu), which visualizes hosts conducting attacks against our honeypots on the internet.

Q: How is Deutsche Telekom contributing to Honeynet project this year?

Markus: Besides sponsoring the current and previous workshop, we both joined the Sysenter chapter. We developed some of our own honeypots (partly available on the honeynet docker account) and plan to continue our efforts, for example with the above mentioned “honeypot platform” developed by one of our colleagues.

Deutsche Telekom is the main sponsor of this year’s annual Honeynet Project Workshop 2015, which will be in Stavanger, Norway, over 18th to 20th May 2015. The three day workshop event is for IT professionals and provides exclusive access to over 30 talks including briefings and hands on training sessions dedicated to sharing research and knowledge on the latest threats to cyber security.

For information on tickets, the schedule, and this year’s event location visit the Honeynet Project Workshop 2015 event website.