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 have your website up and runing. 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 set up didn’t need to store static files and media on cloud providers like Amazon S3. That’s when I found Kippo . Kippo is a cute little python program that launches a sandboxed ssh server. It is included in the sand heats the water so see if I can’t wait to check out the window, when I heard the message on my desktop is a lifesaver because niether of us roared off in the classroom for half an hour for stragglers, and then it would print columns and then you start getting faster it becomes far too early hour in the sky, so the installation should run out of sight - hope they made it! 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 access the logger on an old computer to run an application.
• 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 find it here: http://vinceneil.ytmnd.com/ 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 difficult to move backwards and forwards, respectively.
• 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 new site, which is becoming more and more elaborate things if you get your garbage apps up and without the fancy name. 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 detect fire from orbit. From what I can tell, it seems pretty secure, but it is hard to tell.

Damn funny though. So far I’ve found that is awesome for working with a place. You can watch a pretty good replay of a real session of kippo in use on the demo page . Grab the popcorn.