Breaking into the loop

Jacob (@BiosShadow), has released his first blog post, Being out of the Loop, since we were paired up and it has struck a chord with my own experience with similar problems and got me thinking at the same time. To sum up Jacob’s post he his frustrated that there is no active infosec community within a reasonable distance of his location. I can relate to this sentiment; when beginning the slow road towards an infosec career, before I was even aware a legitimate career in the field was possible, my own interactions and learning opportunities were limited to reading books or online articles.
For my part: If you’re in the North East of England (or general area) get in touch and let me know, always keen to discuss information security with anyone willing to listen.

Amun statistics

Amun has been running away quite happily in my lab since initial install. From a statistic perspective my wor has been made really easy as Miguel Cabrerizo has previously taken one of the InfoSanity statistic scripts written for Nepenthes and Dionaea and adapted it to parse Amun’s submission.log files. If you’re wanting to get an overview of submissions from another Amun sensor the script has been uploaded alongside the other InfoSanity resources and is available here.

Starting with Amun

No single technology can do or handle every situation; the same holds true with honeypot sensors which is why I’m always interested in finding new systems to add to my environment. I’d had Amun on my list of potentials for a while, but after reading a short blog post that suggested install and setup was relatively quick and painless, it got moved up the to-do list.

Gain and maintain passion for infosec

When talking to anyone working in infosec one aspect remains constant from the rockstars at the top of the media game, the guys in the trenches or the newbies looking for a break; that constant is passion. Ultimately passion is what makes the difference between a job and a career, and in a world with the extra curricular requirements, continued professional development and somewhat crazy work hours that are related to the infosec world passion can be easy to lose and the daily grind results in the infamous burn-out. This makes it really important to have a few ways to remind you why you do what you do.

Determining connection source from honeyd.log – cymruwhois version

InfoSanity’s honeyd-geoip.py script has been useful for analysing the initial findings from a HoneyD installation, but one of weaknesses identified in the geolocation database used by the script was that a large proportion of the source IP addresses connecting to the honeypot environment weren’t none within the database. Markus pointed me in the direction of the cymruwhois (discussed previously)python module as an alternative. I’ve re-written the initial script.

Team Cymru Whois

Since posting my Python whois class it’s lead to a (relatively) high volume of search hits pointing people to it. So I’d like to apologise for inflicting my code on other people. After a recent post with the honey-geoip.py script I was pointed in the direction Team Cymru’s whois service and accompanying python script.