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Bringing the dead back to life

In early 2005 the SURFids Framework, later renamed to SURFcert IDS, was developed (http://ids.surfnet.nl/wiki/doku.php). The unique concept was the centralised detection approach, based on honeypots, with decentralised sensors running OpenVPN. From a marketing perspective ‘IDS’ was chosen in the name, in that age a popular term. Many organisations worldwide have used this open-source framework, however with a last update on the code in 2011, the project slowly died.

The Conpot development team is proud to announce the 0.5.0 release. Highlights of this release are the support for two new protocols and one additional device. Peter Soóky did a major contribution with support for the BACnet protocol, which is used for building automation and control networks, and support for IPMI, which is used an interface to a computer subsystem that provides management and monitoring capabilities independently of the host system’s CPU, firmware and operating system (consider the insights you can get from someone exploiting this). As mentioned in an earlier blog post, we also added support to emulate a Guardian AST device. This is based on the research from Kyle Wilhoit and Stephen Hilt.
Another goal of this release was to improve the ease of deployment. Therefore we added a Docker container template. Thanks to our contributors, we also have documentation on how to run Conpot on CentOS.
To avoid some easy fingerprinting, we added the feature to modify the MAC address of the interface Conpot is listening on. So now your hardware address can match the device manufacturer you are intending to emulate.
As with every other release, we tried to improve our test coverage and code quality in order to increase the honeypots stability.

Posting this blogpost on behalf of Dmitry Rodionov.

Hi there! I’m Dmitry Rodionov and this summer I’ve been working on an OS X analyzer for Cuckoo Sandbox project.

Cuckoo Sandbox

First things first: what is Cuckoo Sandbox? Imagine a box you can put any suspicious program or script into and immediately receive a complete description of what this program is and what it does. Well, that’s Cuckoo!

Cuckoo launches every program in a separate virtual machine (a sandbox), so there is no risk for your own computer to be infected with a virus or to leak private information.

1. Hello Andre and congratulations on getting the CEO job ! Can you please tell us a bit more about yourself. What is your background for instance ?

Oh where to start? I have been in the security field for the last 15 or so years, doing various things like running IT/security for small mortgage companies, being a pentester/audit consulting type, doing front line IDS/IR work for large global infrastructure providers, as well as building custom detection systems and analysis tools for large commercial orgs. Beyond my work life I have been heavily involved in the security community as and individual as well as part of non profits in the past. I have had a tremendous amount of fun participating in and instigating (in some case) large botnet/malware interdiction efforts including conficker, koobface, waledec, storm, dnschanger, and others. Those efforts were all exciting and amazing opportunities to work with others to figure out how those threats works and come up with ideas on how to disrupt them while raising awareness of the threat they posed.

The Conpot team is following closely the latest developments in Honeypot research and the methods and technologies used. If you look at the topics presented on security conferences, you might have also noticed an increased interest in ICS security and honeypot technologies in the last two years. One presentation from this years Blackhat’15 conference caught my attention also knowing previous research done by Kyle and Stephen: “The little pump gauge that could: Attacks against gas pump monitoring systems” [link] If you are interested in their findings, I recommend their white paper: “The GasPot Experiment: Unexamined Perils in Using Gas-Tank-Monitoring Systems“ [link, pdf] by Kyle Wilhoit and Stephen Hilt from Trend Micro’s Forward-Looking Threat Research team.

TL;DR: Low interaction honeypots are designed to emulate vulnerable services and potentially detect attacks without exposing full operating system functionality. Although they have evolved in many ways over the past 15 years, understanding their limitations and sometimes inherent design weaknesses is important when you consider deploying them. Understanding the history of attempted honeypot detection and evasion allows system defenders to improve their continued use of honeypots and hopefully helps makes all of our networks safer.

Marie has a Ph. D. in information security and  is passionate about incident handling and information sharing. She has experience as a team leader at NSM NorCERT, the Norwegian national CERT. Marie also teaches a class on incident management and contingency planning at Gjøvik University College.

What was your motivation to enter Information Security field, and who inspired and helped you along the way?

I didn’t intend to become an infosec professional, I just let my interest, talent and curiosity lead me along the way. When I started university I chose maths and physics because I had been to an educational fair and talked to a cool lady with a degree in bio-physics who did research on how to cure cancer. Then I discovered that I had more talent and interest in mathematics than in physics and I ended up doing my master thesis on algebra and crypto-analysis, which was really fun! A very inspiring professor in algebra, prof. Idun Reiten, was one reason that I went in that direction. I wanted to do a Ph.D., but not in abstract algebra as that quickly became a little bit too abstract for me. I was then lucky to get a Ph.D. position at the Telematics department doing infosec research, and that was what brought me into this field.

Francesca Bosco earned a law degree in International Law and joined UNICRI in 2006 as a member of the Emerging Crimes Unit. She is responsible for cybercrime prevention projects, and in conjunction with key strategic partners, has developed new methodologies and strategies for researching and countering computer related crimes.

Welcome to the Honeynet Workshop Francesca, can you share what was your motivation to enter Information Security field, and who inspired and helped you along the way?

Lukas Rist is a software engineer with Blue Coat Norway where he develops behavioral malware analysis systems. In his spare time, he works on web application and ICS/SCADA honeypots and botnet monitoring tools under the umbrella of the Honeynet Project where he is also a Director. He recently developed an interest in deployment automation, ephemeral file systems and exotic industrial communication protocols.

1) What was your motivation to enter Information Security field, and who inspired and helped you along the way?