A while ago I was offered an excellent opportunity to read and review Mike Shema’s contribution to Syngress’s Seven Deadliest series focused on web application security. My first impression was very positive, and now I’ve had a chance to get my hands on the finished product I haven’t been disappointed.
Author archives: infosanity
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.
Digital Security & Governance for SMEs
Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the Digital Security & Governance for SMEs at Northumbria University. The purpose of the event was to help SMEs better understand that threats targeting their information systems, their responsibilities in securing personally identifiable information (PII) and to introduce NUWARP
Quick and Easy Nepenthes installation
I’ve just completed a new Nepenthes installation, and found the process far simpler than my first attempt as I didn’t compile from source.
24hrs of HoneyD logs
After an initial setup and configuration of HoneyD I took a snapshot of the honeyd.log file after running for a 24hr period. Running honeydsum against the log file generated some good overview information. There were over 12000 connections made to the emulated network, averaging one connection every 7 seconds. Despite the volume of connections, each source generally only initiated a handful of connections.
Honeydsum: HoneyD log analyser
Honeydsum is a script created by Lucio Henrique Franco and Carlos Henrique Peixoto Caetano Chaves for the Brazilian Honeynet project. As described by it’s Authors, it is a tool written in Perl designed to generate a text summary from Honeyd logs.
Determining connection source from honeyd.log
After getting a working HoneyD environment I wanted to better dig into the information provided by the system. First up was a quick script to get a feel for where the attacks/connections originate from. At first glance I really like the log format that is used by honeyd.log, it is nice an easy to parse. From this I quickly knocked up a python script to parse the honeyd.log file, collect a list of unique source addresses and finally use GeoIP to determine (and count) the county of origin.
Basic HoneyD configuration
After first getting HoneyD up and running previously for a proof of concept I’ve begun a wider implementation of HoneyD to function as the backbone for an upgraded research environment.
HoneyD’s key strength is it’s flexibility, HoneyD’s website contains some sample configuration files that show HoneyD emulating multiple systems running different OSes and applications, a large multi-site network and even a config file to create a honeypot environment for a wireless network. I’ve found these samples immensely useful references for developing custom templates for my own implementation.