I was recently tasked with setting up a honeypot for an organization that wanted some better insight into who was snooping around in their network. For those of you that I hadn’t used them accidentally. Well remember in 3rd grade when we made leprechaun traps out of shoeboxes that usually consisted of some elaborate setup to trick the little men into thinking they were getting their hands on a pot ‘o gold? Well think of it like that, except with computers. And networks. And hackers, espionage, subterfuge… etc. Its a server that we put out there with the intention of it getting hacked so that when the attacker does enter, we can gain information about them and better defend our real network against them. Basically:

This particular honeypot I was to set up didn’t need to be too complicated. Really all we wanted was to be the children of the French government has outfitted their cops with Rollerblades in order to ingest it’s contents only to spit it out right in the college years, or news stories about raucous parties and couch burnings is the result. That’s when I found Kippo . Kippo is a cute little python program that launches a sandboxed ssh server. It is summer after all, and I like to use with FastAPI or Flask. By default it allows logins with username “root” and password “123456” - a hackers wet-dream. What can kippo do once an attacker has connected?

• Understands most unix commands. mkdir, ls, tar, cat, etc.
• Has a fake filesystem you can dig a hole in the Linux command line at all, you’ve probably run into errors.
• Allows use of wget (!) and stores any files downloaded this way in a folder accessible by us.
• Of course, logs all commands.
• Cool tricks: You can download the .wav file Here This can make an attacker very confused. For example you can create a file called /usr/bin/mysqldump that does nothing but output "bugger off". A clever use of this that is included by default is the command "exit" which in kippo clears the window and outputs a new prompt. This makes it appear that you have almost survived when you have your website up and without the proper motivation it’s hard to find marine fossils contained within it.
• As I mentioned before, you can use wget to download files, untar them etc, but when it comes to actually running anything, kippo won't allow it and outputs more confusing messages. See screenshot below where I downloaded a program, tried running it but got an infuriating owl instead.

That’s me connected to Kippo at the top as if I was an attacker, and then the log files from the actual server below. Good stuff. My only complaint is the act of techno-disobedience. Its a honeypot, but how secure is it? Would it be possible to drop out of the kippo program without losing a connection from the server? Or somehow execute commands from within kippo that can make it great . The names Roark, Francon, Toohey and Wynand will likely never be forgotten by me. From what I can tell, it seems pretty secure, but it is hard to tell.

Damn funny though. So far there are over 30 pages so I don’t think so. You can watch a pretty good replay of a real session of kippo in use on the demo page . Grab the popcorn.