Folks, we had a great day at the first-ever public Honeynet Project Security Workshop yesterday with many excellent presentations by our members from around the globe. The presentations ranged from deep technical dives around shellcode detection and mobile malware reverse engineering to views on social dynamics of attackers and ethics of computer security research.

Further, we hosted a small capture-the-flag/forensic challenge competition, which received plentiful participation - especially with the younger crowd.

The Honeynet Project has been all over the media again lately, mostly due to our visualization research. Ben Reardon (@benreardon) from Australia Honeypot Project VOIP honeynet visualizations appeared on BoingBoing, Geek.com, SmartPlanet, ThreatPost and ZDNet France as well as on many other media venues.

However, the highest profile showing was in the “New Scientist” , leading to more then 100,000 views!

23:00 UTC Friday March 11th was the first deadline for Google Summer of Code 2011, and the cut off point for organizations interesting in participating to complete their org application.

I’m very pleased to confirm that the Honeynet Project have once again applied. Whilst we now patiently wait for Google to announce which organizations will be selected to participate on March 18th, interested prospective students can start looking at our our initial GSoC 2011 project ideas and find more information about getting involved with the Honeynet Project and Google Summer of Code 2011 here - including contact details for email and IRC. Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or project ideas.

Just a reminder, there is still time to register for The 2011 Honeynet Project Security Workshop.

More information: honeynet.org/node/602
Register: regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?EventID=929631

About the event:

The 2011 Project Honeynet Security Workshop brings together experts in the field of information security from around the world to share the latest advances and threats in information security research. Organized by the not-for-profit Honeynet Project and co-sponsored by the ESIEA Engineering School, this full day workshop creates opportunities for networking, collaboration and lessons-learned featuring a rare, outstanding line-up of international security professionals who will present on the latest research tools and findings in the field.

Not all of you might know it, but The Honeynet Project is well-represented on social media. Apart from this blog, we have:

• An official Project Twitter feed @projecthoneynet
• Facebook group ‘The Honeynet Project’
• LinkedIn group ‘The Honeynet Project’
• “Old school” public mailing list, still at SecurityFocus

Finally, if you consider IRC to be social media (and why not?), we still run these:

#honeynet-project on irc.freenode.net (new, general public enquiries)

#honeynetproject on irc.freenode.net (new, general public enquiries)

Has it really been another year already? Having really enjoyed our experience as a successful mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code 2009 and Google Summer of Code 2010, The Honeynet Project is very pleased to announce that we will once again be applying to be accepted this year as a potential mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2011 (note the changed URL for GSoC 2011).

The first GSoC 2011 deadline is Friday March 11th, which is the deadline for interested organizations to submit their org application. Currently we are reviewing our GSoC 2011 project ideas internally and prospective students will soon be able to see our list of proposed project ideas here. If we are accepted this year by Google, as usual all of our GSoC 2011 information will be available at /gsoc on our main public website.

The following are the Top 5 popular blog posts from The Honeynet Project blog this month.

2. “Observing Botnets” talks about tools to observe bot traffic on the network; it is an excerpt from “Know Your Enemy: Tracking Botnets” paper (fun quote: ‘“A botnet is comparable to compulsory military service for windows boxes” – Stromberg’)

3. “The Honeynet Project Releases New Tool: Cuckoo” covers Cuckoo, a binary analysis sandbox, designed and developed with the general purpose of automating the analysis of malware.

Here is another tool release from The Honeynet Project: Cuckoo Box by Claudio Guarnieri. Cuckoo is a binary analysis sandbox, designed and developed with the general purpose of automating the analysis of malware. Read more about the tool here, grab the tool here – but please read detailed setup guide here (make sure to read it!). BTW, this tool is really well-documented, so make use of it before deploying it.

Cuckoo is a lightweight solution that performs automated dynamic analysis of provided Windows binaries. It is able to return comprehensive reports on key API calls and network activity. Current features are:

Here is another new release from the Project: a release of a new tool called PhoneyC, a virtual client honeypot.
PhoneyC is a virtual client honeypot, meaning it is not a real application (that can be compromised by attackers and then monitored for analysis of attacker behavior), but rather an emulated client, implemented in Python. The main thing it does is scour web pages looking for those that attack the browser.
It can be run, for example, as: $ python phoneyc.py -v www.google.com
By using dynamic analysis, PhoneyC is able to remove the obfuscation from many malicious pages. Furthermore, PhoneyC emulates specific vulnerabilities to pinpoint the attack vector. PhoneyC is a modular framework that enables the study of malicious HTTP pages and understands modern vulnerabilities and attacker techniques.
Download version 0.1 (a contained readme contains installation instructions) here: phoneyc_v0_1_rev1631.tar_.gz
v0.1 feature highlights include:

There is a paper at WOOT 10’ described how to use smudges on the touch sceen of a smartphone to get largely decrease the time an attacker need to guess the right password to unlock the screen. For example, by for 4 passcode based iPhone, one just need to try at most P(4,4) = 4! = 24 times before he get the right one.

But I think this situation had happened on PC and we already have a solution. Long time ago, we have Trojan that steals the password. To combat with it, people invented virtual keyboard (like used by many online bank in China). But the attacker then upgraded their program to record the mouse coordinates so they still know which character you entered. Isn’t this sounds familiar? Yes, these coordinates are just like the smudges you left on your screen! So what happened next? We have randomized virtual keyboard.