Mercury – Live Honeypot DVD

<UPDATE>Live download mirror: carnivore.it</UPDATE>
Mercury Live DVD was initially (I believe) announced in a post to the Nepenthes Mailing list. It is a remastered Ubuntu distribution with pre-installed honeypot applications and malware analysis tools created by John Moore. From the ReadMe:

This live DVD is a remastered version of Ubuntu 10.0 Beta LTS x86_32. It was designed due to my being disappointed with another reverse engineering malware live CD that was released recently. I have decided to call my creation MERCURY, which is an acronym for Malware Enumeration, Capture, and Reverse Engineering.
The Mercury live DVD contains tools used for digital forensics, data recovery, network monitoring, and spoofing. It should primarily be used as a honeypot or network monitoring platform as well as a laboratory and teaching aid. There are three honeypots installed – honeyd, nepenthes, and dionaea. Four, if you include netcat.

The majority of the additional applications reside in /opt:

• Dionaea (0.1.0) – Dionaea is a malware collection honeypot focusing primarily on SMB emulation, covered on InfoSanity numerous times before.
• FFP – Fuzzy Fingerprinting is a util to aid SSH MitM attacks.
• jsunpack-n – Is a Javascript unpacker, perfect for analysis captured or potentially malicious URLs in more depth.
• Kippo (svn rev.169) – Kippo is an low-medium interaction SSH honeypot, Also covered
• mitm-ssh – Unsurprisingly, a utility for aiding man in the middle attacks against SSH connections.
• Origami & pdftools – Two frameworks for analysing malicious PDF files.
• Volatility – an excellent memory analysis toolkit
• Zerowine-vm – A malware behavior analysis platform. I’ve covered ZeroWine here before, and whilst I find it useful for initial analysis I found it a pain to setup and get running. The fact this works out of the box on Mercury is enough reason alone to keep the .iso handy.

Other tools are installed on the system as started, access from standard locations (/etc, /usr/bin, etc.). I won’t try to list them all, but some highlights include:

• Nepenthes – Dionaea’s predecessor
• Honeyd – Honeypot system, perfect for emulating multiple different systems from one platform. Covered in more depth here.
• John – John the Ripper, password cracker
• ircd-hybrid – irc server daemon, useful for analysis irc-based malware’s interaction with command and control systems.
• Snort – de-facto intrusion detection system.
• Wireshark – Packet capture and network analysis tools.

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea.
Setting up a honeypot, and analysing the results, has never been easier. And I’m sure the toolkit’s functionality will also be useful in other scenarios; incident response, general network administration or as a safe learning platform. So what are you waiting for?
–Andrew Waite
N.B. there have been several mirror’s and downloads established, the most reliable download source I’ve used is Markus’ mirror at carnivore.it