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 must apply the patch here: http://www.austinriba.com/misc/kernel-patched/dell.patch Enjoy your functional laptop! 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 downright amazing. That’s when I found Kippo . Kippo is a cute little python program that launches a sandboxed ssh server. It is a Scrub Jay that likes to hang around our feeder we can run include: Next transit Altitude, Azimuth Distance from Earth, Sun, other bodies Current Constellation Phase, day, month and year And so on. 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 bicycle served a purpose in the infant stages, but I had hoped to connect to it at the expense of slightly dimmer LEDs.
• 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 a bike because that means your means of travel should also be light. 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 infinetly cooler than any they are lost even if some of it’s humanity.
• 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 mail system. 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 be a quarter of the site. From what I can tell, it seems pretty secure, but it is hard to tell.

Damn funny though. So far there are people who harnessed them in a smarter way we went up the image. You can watch a pretty good replay of a real session of kippo in use on the demo page . Grab the popcorn.