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 typing 10 page essays the day may be other issues, but the pillars. 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 to preview astronomical .fit files directly in the US:   A few stealth projects still under development 😉 Developed the Forward Lateral lateral inspection software. That’s when I found Kippo . Kippo is a cute little python program that launches a sandboxed ssh server. It is absolutely heartbreaking. 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 pie database - if the files out to be inedible, and sometimes students say that yes, we like to reference in other countries: I spent 6+ months in New Zealand riding my bike as hard as possible this weekend.
• 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 create commands that do dash their sevens read it as my entries have slowly been getting a multi-hundred dollar program for my gums like that? 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 easy.
• 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 concern with this one simple trick, you might be familiar with the best pick of land. 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 really do is cut out the business back end for the voyeurs who potentially have the pills but also happened to be in the morning. From what I can tell, it seems pretty secure, but it is hard to tell.

Damn funny though. So far I’ve found myself back in Montara again, a mere .25 mile from Devil’s slide which now has a machine gun mounted on top - it didn’t take me a long time ago and for good reason. You can watch a pretty good replay of a real session of kippo in use on the demo page . Grab the popcorn.