I am very pleased to announce the publication of another paper in our Know Your Enemy white paper series: “KYE - Social Dynamics of Hacking” authored by Thomas J. Holt and Max Kilger from our Spartan Devils Honeynet Project Chapter. In this paper, Tom and Max go to the roots of the Know Your Enemy series and shine light on the social groups that are involved in hacking.
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Abstract
Though most information security research focuses on current threats, tools, and techniques to defeat attacks, it is vital to recognize and understand the humans behind attacks. Individual attackers have various skills, motives, and social relationships that shape their actions and the resources they target. In this paper we will explore the distribution of skill in the global hacker community, the influence of on and off-line social relationships, motivations across attackers, and the near-future of threats to improve our understanding of the hacker and attacker community.
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In the last months I spent a lot of efforts in Thug development. During these months a few interesting features and improvements were introduced but right now I want to spend some time for taking a look at the new plugin framework introduced in the version 0.3.0. If you ever thought about extending Thug with additional features but didn’t know how to do it you should really keep on reading. Let’s start by taking a look a the code.

Although it is still time for the official coding period start at GSoC 2012, i started to make my commits for the Network Analyzer project . The output of the project will be a web based traffic analyzer. It is aimed to let people upload their files from web interface and see the results. Instead of the detail header information, network analyzer will be focusing on applicaiton level data for display. One will be able to find answer to questions like what is the response HTML, is there any malicous javascript files at the header of the HTML file, is there any binary attachment at the sent mail, is it malicious, etc. The project is aimed to display these results by using visualization. The visualization details can be found at the project site:

We where glad to announce yet another tool during our annual workshop in San Francisco. Glaspot is the third version of the web application honeypot Glastopf and it come with some very powerful new features:

• A build-in PHP sandbox for code injection emulation, allowing us to bring vulnerability emulation to a new level
• Hooked up to the HPFeeds generic data feed system for centralized data collection and tight integration into our sandbox and web server botnet monitoring system
• Modular implementation: Turn your web application into a honeypot with a few easy steps
• Runs in his own lightweight Python server or as a WSGI module in common web server environments
• Automated attack surface generation and expansion

In the next three months we are working on even more exciting new features and a much stronger integration into our web thread analysis platform.
Additionally Phani Vadrevu got accepted as a Google Summer of Code student to help us with additional improvements like request classification based on attacker profiling, hardening the internal sandbox and extending the attack surface. Details can be found in his project description: Glastopf Improvements.

Since my last post about the Google Summer Of Code 2012 Student Applications deadline closing and sharing some initial student applications statistics, all the GSoC 2012 mentoring organisations have been hard at work reviewing and scoring their student applications.

After what seems like a very long few weeks for students, mentors and org-admins alike, the waiting is finally over! If you haven’t already seen it, the GSoC 2012 student selection results were formally announced by Google on Monday April 23rd:

At the Honeynet Project workshop 2012, we raffled off a brand new Norman Malware Analyzer G2. Thanks everybody for participating in the raffle.

The winner of this year’s raffle is Todd Straceski from Zynga. Congratulations to Todd!

Thanks again to Norman to sponsoring the Honeynet Project workshop 2012. We hope to see you all again next year.

After a slower than usual start, this years Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student applications period closed at 19:00 UTC on Friday April 6th, with a major application rush in the last couple of days which kept us busy right up to the deadline! Many thanks to all the interested students who applied, and our mentors and org admins for taking the time to respond to students on IRC, email and through Melange. Even if you don’t get accepted as student for GSoC 2012 with the Honeynet Project, please do consider trying to work on your chosen project and becoming part of our community anyway, as we are all volunteers and would be happy to welcome and support you too.

If you have been following our blog you’ll know that the Honeynet Project was very happy to have been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2012.

If you are a student interested in applying to the Honeynet Project, the student application deadline is 19:00 UTC on Friday April 6th. So with 3 days to go, you need to be planning on submitting your project application via the Melange system soon. To avoid disappointment, please don’t leave your application until the last minute - you can edit as often as you want before the deadline.

On March 31, 2012, the Honeynet Project published a draft Code of Conduct and a statement about Ethics in Computer Security Research: Kelihos.B/Hlux.B botnet takedown.

The initial draft of the Code of Conduct was drawn from concepts described in the The Menlo Report: Ethical Principles Guiding Information and Communication Technology Research that was published in the United States Federal Register on December 28, 2011 for public comment. The Code of Conduct was refined through discussion within the Legal and Ethics Committee and volunteer Honeynet Project members to help make it workable within the structure of the Honeynet Project membership for evaluating the ethics of future research activities.

Earlier, we posted about our operation on the Kelihos.B/Hlux.B botnet takedown that was conducted with by security experts from Dell SecureWorks, CrowdStrike, Kaspersky, and the Honeynet Project. On initial view, the operation seems very clear cut: the bad guys are running a botnet that is doing havoc on the Internet; on the other side, are the good guys that have found a way to disable the botnet.

The situation is much more nuanced. The Honeynet Project has been conducting security research for over a decade now and since our early days, we made it a priority to balance benefit and risks in our research. You can trace this back to when the Honeynet Project first defined “data control” as one of the requirements for honeynet/honeypot deployments. The purpose of data control was to minimize potential harm to others resulting from honeypots, which by their nature are vulnerable systems we expect to be compromised and used by malicious actors.