Honeypots – ZIRCONIC

September 2016 Honeypot Results

Posted on October 4, 2016 by rhyolite

Honeypot update – I still have four Dionaea honeypots running in NYC, Frankfurt, Bangalore and Singapore (the GRAB series) and a single Conpot running in NYC (JUMPSEAT).

sepstats1

I didn’t have a similar issue in September as I did in August (when the sheer volume of traffic caused the honeypots to run out of inodes in the first 3-10 days of the month) though Frankfurt ran out towards the very end of the night on the 30^th of September, so that cut it close a bit.

GRAB-NYC03:
Connections: 752,296
Unique IPs: 19,507
Files Downloaded: 5
sepstats2

sepstats3

Interesting to see Kazakhstan make the list this time, with Romania making up a sizable portion of the totals this time around.

sepstats4

UPnP, again, strongly the most popular, and therefore no surprise when we look at the ports:

sepstats5

sepstats6

The top IP address, 40.84.185.138 leads back to Microsoft, actually, as do the next three addresses. 191.237.45.46 apparently leads back to Microsoft also, but this particular entry gets associated with someone apparently with Microsoft in Brazil (Benjamin Orndorff, who apparently is located in Seattle). Maybe this is just a provocation… The next two after that lead back to hosting providers in Europe, while the one after that, 65.19.129.154, seem to lead back to an electric company in California, with a NOC in Sterling, VA. The last two are Microsoft and a hosting provider in Canada.

Here’s a map showing the attacker locations:

sepstats7
sepstats8

Next is the Frankfurt honeypot:

GRAB-FRA01:
Connections: 1,127,930
Unique IPs: 20,659
Files Downloaded: 15

Pretty spectacular number of connections – this is a new personal record for any of my honeypots.

sepstats9
sepstats10
Vietnam making the top 3 this time!

Similar results in terms of the shape of the graph for services, but wow – over a million UPnP connections.

sepstats11

sepstats12
sepstats13
The top IP address leads back to some person in Vietnam. The second highest leads back to that electric company. Turns out it’s actually a hosting provider (Hurricane Electric), so not mysterious anymore. The remainder are hosting providers in France, Hong Kong, and also some of the same parties from Microsoft that we saw earlier with GRAB-NYC.

Now for the maps:

sepstats14
sepstats15

GRAB-SIN01:
Connections: 500,737
Unique IPs: 21,688
Files Downloaded: 10,518

Again, not a mistake – this honeypot set a new record for number of samples collected. Like last month – almost ALL of these downloads were Conficker variants. I did find one other piece of malware in there (Parite-C). I find it really interesting that there is so much Conficker in this region, and how it doesn’t seem to spread to my other honeypots.

sepstats16
sepstats17

India makes the list, which is a first, as well as Venezuela and Ireland.

sepstats18

sepstats19

Services and ports are pretty much in line with other regions.

sepstats20
Microsoft coming in at number 1! And 2, and 3, and 4, 5… and 7… and 10. What the hell? The rest were just some hosting providers in various places (one in India).

Now, maps:

sepstats21

sepstats22

Bangalore:

GRAB-BAN01:
Connections: 457,464
Unique IPs: 21,221
Files Downloaded: 2

As usual, dismal number of files collected from Bangalore. Also, like last month,this honeypot has the highest number of unique IPs of all the GRAB honeypots.

sepstats23

sepstats24

Services/ports in line with other regions:

sepstats25

sepstats26

Microsoft dominates these results also, 7/10. The rest are hosting providers (including one from AWS).

sepstats27

Some maps:

sepstats28

sepstats32

Much more activity on JUMPSEAT in September, here are the total connections by protocol:

sepstats30

Last month saw Modbus as the most popular protocol, followed by all variants of HTTP, so much different this month. Perhaps the parties involved noticed that my honeypot doesn’t quite seem right and stopped bothering.

sepstats31

Lots of activity, but nothing as clearly anomalous as when we had shodan.io scanning the honeypot in August. 80.82.70.24 leads back to a hosting provider in Seychelles. 184.105.139.67 is Shadow Server, again. 52.42.34.123 leads back to Amazon while the next two lead back to Poland. One of them is actually a security company I’m familiar with! Hello there! The last one leads back to UC Berkeley.

That’s it for September, on to other things.

August Honeypot Statistics

Posted on September 6, 2016 - September 2, 2016 by rhyolite

Time for an update on my constellation of honeypots. As you may recall from my last update, I currently have four Dionaea honeypots running in NYC, Frankfurt, Bangalore and Singapore (the GRAB series) and a single Conpot running in NYC (JUMPSEAT).

grab1

I had a bit of an issue this month that caused me to lose some data from the honeypots. The issue was the same on all the GRAB honeypots, but the circumstances were different and this is what’s interesting to me. I ran out of inodes on all four honeypots. On two of them (NYC and Frankfurt), this is definitely my fault as I never backed up and removed the bistreams stored on both of them, so after almost two months of operation I simply ran out of inodes there. However, on my other two, what was pretty crazy is that I ran out of inodes shortly after bringing them online due to the high volume of traffic on both honeypots. One honeypot ran out of inodes after seven days, and the other after three days due to the sheer volume of attacks. I didn’t think I’d have to check on them that frequently, but looks like we’re doing ok now. Maybe there was some sort of campaign in that part of the world… Here are the stats.

GRAB-NYC03:
Connections: 757,521
Unique IPs: 19,192
Files Downloaded: 12

2ndmonth1

2ndmonth2

Similar results to last time I measured – though keep in mind that I did lose about 10 days of data from this one, so the full results probably would have been much higher. Romania increased its share to about 6% of the total attacks (up from about 0.71% last month).

2ndmonth3

2ndmonth4

A more varied mix of services, while UPnP remains the most popular.
Again, not a shock that the most activity also came through port 1900, the UDP port for UPnP.

2ndmonth5

Actually a new set of top 10 IPs this time, with fewer attacks per IP address than last month (which had one address responsible for about 80,000 attacks). The top IP with 14,057 attacks leads back to AWS. The next one, 45.32.222.158, leads to Choopa, LLC, a managed hosting company in Matawan, NJ. According to their Google reviews, they are known for hosting malicious actors. Good to keep in mind in case I ever need a “permissive” host someday. Number 4 on the list, 94.236.95.171, is odd because it originates at Beggars Group, Ltd, a group of record labels. Numbers 5 and 6 originate in Beijing.

Here’s a map showing the attacker locations:
2ndmonth6

2ndmonth7

Next is the Frankfurt honeypot:

GRAB-FRA01:
Connections: 745,068
Unique IPs: 13,803
Files Downloaded: 13

Again, results more or less in line with last month, keeping in mind the loss of 10 days of data. More unique IPs this time, many fewer files downloaded.

2ndmonth8

2ndmonth9

Similar to the results from the NYC honeypot.

2ndmonth10

The huge number of UPnP connections looks more like the prior month’s results (compared with NYC’s results).

2ndmonth11

Therefore, no shock here when looking at ports.

2ndmonth12

Like NYC, a new set of characters this time around. Nearly 110,000 attacks from 54.211.52.121, which leads back to AWS. In number 3, 94.236.95.171, we again see that Beggars Group, Ltd entity. Numbers 4 and 5 lead back to Beijing.

Here’s another map of the attackers, with an alternate view of the same data as well:

2ndmonth13

2ndmonth14

Now for the new honeypots!

GRAB-SIN01:
Connections: 154,834
Unique IPs: 17,750
Files Downloaded: 2,003

That’s not a mistake – I really did get just over 2,000 files collected in the Singapore honeypot. Almost all of them were Conficker variants. Out of all the unique binaries, I only found one Pepex variant and a Poebot variant, then 137 different Conficker binaries. I haven’t found Conficker in any of my other honeypots so far. Really unbelievable how many files I captured in such a small attack surface (compared with my other honeypots).

2ndmonth15 2ndmonth16

Interesting split – this makes me think that there is some sort of regional difference here, at least compared with my other honeypots. We see China higher up and also Vietnam, which so far I haven’t seen in the top 10 anywhere else.

2ndmonth17

A bit more diversity in these services, closer to what NYC looked like vs. Frankfurt.

2ndmonth18

2ndmonth19
This time, Beggars Group is the top IP address messing around with my Singapore honeypot. Coming in at number 3 is 208.78.164.135, at Valve Corporation. Number 6, 188.165.192.91, leads to OVH in France. Number 9, 54.166.233.236, shows up as AWS. The final one there, 93.174.93.136, leads to Quasi Networks, based in Seychelles. Their barely functioning website advises that they are building sites in Amsterdam, Stockholm, Frankfurt, Moscow and London and that their website will be online soon. I guess they already have the hosting up and running… Another one to keep in mind in case I need a permissive host. Interesting that this hub didn’t see any Chinese addresses in the top 10.

2ndmonth21 2ndmonth20

Bangalore:

GRAB-BAN01:
Connections: 72,685
Unique IPs: 19,299
Files Downloaded: 1

Dismal number of files collected from Bangalore. Interesting that this honeypot has the highest number of unique IPs of all the GRAB honeypots. Also interesting that this honeypot has the highest diversity of connections (the top is “Other” which encompasses individual countries that were too small to fit on the top 10 on their own, followed by China and the USA).

2ndmonth22 2ndmonth23

Nothing too out of the ordinary in terms of services and ports:

2ndmonth28 2ndmonth27 2ndmonth24

Beggars Group, Ltd, is number 1 again, at 94.236.95.171. Numbers 2 and 3 are in Beijing, number 4 is Valve Corporation again. We saw OVH again, in 8^th place, at 188.165.192.91. Otherwise, nothing too new or interesting here.

Some maps:

2ndmonth25 2ndmonth26

With JUMPSEAT, I’m running a Conpot honeypot, and I don’t have as many options as far as reporting as I do with the Dionaea honeypots. I took the raw logs and did some work with them in LibreOffice. Here are some numbers regarding the total numbers of connections that I had:

2ndmonth29

Modbus was the most popular protocol, followed by all variants of HTTP. There were a few other things scattered around in there. Looking at attacks by IP address, things get more interesting:

2ndmonth30

71.6.167.142 leads to a hosting company called CariNet out in San Diego, CA. This person scanned just about every port on JUMPSEAT. The other addresses were definitely more typical of the activity I got on this honeypot, as you can see from the numbers. 113.240.250.156 and 106.38.241.111 lead to Beijing. 91.196.50.33 and 185.25.148.240 lead back to a hosting company in Poland. 67.87.198.46 actually leads to Optimum Online in NY – is someone scanning these from home?

When I ran 71.6.167.142 through robtex.com, it actually appears that this is shodan.io. The way it scanned the honeypot makes sense now.

That’s it for this month.

JUMPSEAT

Posted on August 16, 2016 - August 4, 2016 by rhyolite

Continuing on the subject of honeypots, I wanted to see if I could get something set up as an ICS/SCADA honeypot. I’ve noticed traffic on some of the GRAB series honeypots that could be Modbus connections, for instance. I’m also pretty interested in ICS/SCADA in general, so I looked into whatever I could find regarding honeypots that I might be able to set up myself. In the end I set up a single Conpot honeypot, and I thought I’d share my notes in case it helped save someone some time.

I identified several potential honeypots to try:
– Digital Bond’s SCADA Honeynet
– Cisco CIAG’s SCADA Honeynet
– Fieldbus Honeypot
– SHaPe honeypot
– Conpot

Ultimately, Conpot was the only one I got to work. Here are my notes on everything:

Digital Bond’s SCADA Honeynet
This sounded like it would be the most robust and realistic of all the honeypots that I could find, but I ran into issues during installation. First, the documentation and system is from 2006, so a lot of the instructions are really out of date (for instance, one document referred to installation on an Ubuntu 6.x system). I ran into a few issues while installing dependencies, but I was able to get past those — specifically, instead of xlibs-dev, install libx11-dev, and automake1.11 instead of automake1.9. The real issues came when I tried to install VMware server. This used to be freely available, but isn’t really available anymore from VMware (I’ll explain what I mean by this). The installation instructions from Digital Bond specifies a link to download an old version of VMware server for Linux (1.0.2) and this link still works, however with my current version of Ubuntu (16.04) I ran into too many issues with the installation and just gave up on it.

Cisco CIAG’s SCADA Honeypot
This system requires Scientific Linux 3 and a formatted, empty floppy disk. Next…

Fieldbus Honeynet
This system came up during searches for these types of honeypots. The info sheet indicates that it handles Modbus and also lists some contact info for creators, however trying to reach out to them resulted in bounced email. Not sure if this is publicly available, and searching didn’t turn up any other email addresses to use to contact them. The overall project page can be found here.

SHaPe Honeypot
I found this one through an interesting academic paper about electric power substation honeypots. They have the source up here. I liked the idea that this would be a module for Dionaea, which meant that I could either add this module to an existing honeypot, or quickly set up a new honeypot running Dionaea (which is very easy) and just use it to run this module. I ultimately ran into various issues during setup, and at this point I was pretty burned out and not interested in pursuing this anymore. If you have more luck, please let me know and maybe I’ll give it another try if you can send me some ideas on what to try.

Conpot
This was the first such honeypot I had heard of, and ended up being the one I installed. They have a great website for the honeypot, and installation was pretty easy. Instructions were sparse but clear. I installed from the git repository, not using pip. I did have issues during installation, but nothing out of the ordinary. One issue was that I needed to install libmysqlclient-dev (apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev), no big deal. The other issue I had, though, appears to be a known issue but again the fix was pretty simple. Basically, I had to downgrade stix and cybox to lower versions and then I was fine:

sudo pip install 'stix>=1.1.1.5,<1.2.0.1'

sudo pip install "cybox==2.1.0.12"

I copied both of those right out of the issue logged on the github page and then I was no longer getting errors. To keep Conpot running in the background after logging out, I used setsid in case you’re wondering how to do that. Finally, to test the honeypot, I went ahead and tried connecting to it:

2016-08-03 15:42:07,581 New Modbus connection from x.x.x.x:38816. (x-x-x-x-x)
2016-08-03 15:54:31,643 New Modbus connection from x.x.x.x:38828. (x-x-x-x-x)

Seems to be working (the xs are in place of my connection info).

I found a great article by Darren Martyn over at xrl about OPSEC for honeypots. There’s a lot of great points there, but overall — DON’T leave the default Conpot settings in place when you run your honeypot. Go to the /conpot/templates/default directory (or the directory for whatever template you are using) and look in the .xml file for that template. Here is my default Conpot template before editing:

jumpseat1

You should see the issues right away. Darren’s post highlights some of these, but to recreate his quick check on this, I did a search on shodan.io and look what I found:

jumpseat2

Don’t be these people. Change your default settings. I found dozens of these honeypots all over the world this way. One note — you might go to change the template settings in the /opt/conpot/templates directory. Per this post, go to /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/Conpot-0.5.1-py2.7.egg/conpot/templates [you may have a different version number than I do] and change your templates there. You can test it quickly to be sure by just pulling up your site in your web browser.

Digital Ocean is not great as a host for this type of honeypot because it’ll show up as such in a search — putting it another way, why would an ICS/SCADA system be on a Digital Ocean VPS, or AWS, or GoDaddy.com? Doesn’t really make sense, but for now that’s what I have so I went with another droplet there. Ideally I’d put this new honeypot somewhere that it might actually make sense to have such a system, but I don’t have access to any such facility. I did, however, look around the area and do a little research on some ICS/SCADA sites, and entered values that should be plausible enough to collect some attacks in the honeypot. I’m not going to post any of that info here as that would potentially ruin the honeypot I set up, but what I’d say is look around the area where your honeypot is hosted and try to create a plausible “identity” for your system. Try to also pick a system that 1) uses Modbus and 2) might actually be in use at your choice of cover story. We’ll see how successful I was at setting this up, and hopefully at some point soon I’ll have some interesting info to share about this new system.

I’ve decided to place ICS/SCADA honeypots under the series JUMPSEAT.

GRAB

Posted on August 9, 2016 - July 31, 2016 by rhyolite

I thought it would be a good time to talk a little bit about the “constellation” of honeypots that I have going right now, and what statistics I have gathered on their activity. My Dionaea honeypots are organized under the name GRAB, and the first GRAB honeypot was located in NYC. Several days later I set up the same kind of honeypot and VPS in Frankfurt, and on July 30th I created two more in Singapore and Bangalore.

grab1

I’m not completely satisfied with this constellation just yet – I feel like there are a few gaps here that would be relevant to me. I’m glad that I have coverage in the US and Europe but I’d like to have some coverage in LATAM and Africa. The main reason that I was able to get the VPS coverage in these current locations so quickly was that this is where Digital Ocean has datacenters, and it’s incredibly easy to get a system set up with them (I set up both of the new VPSs and honeypots simultaneously in about 10 minutes). I feel that I absolutely need to get something created in the Russian Federation, and have been looking into options for this. Africa would be interesting, particularly around the Horn, but I have no idea about what the state of hosting is for this region. LATAM would be interesting, and I wonder if there is something good available for hosting in Argentina or Mexico. I’m hoping that the GRAB system I have in Singapore is sufficient for covering East/Southeast Asia and Australia, but we’ll see how that turns out.

My reasoning is that I imagine that while there are malware that will propagate world-wide (and I’ve already seen some samples show up in both NYC and Frankfurt), I imagine there might be some more regional samples that are targeted to a specific region or even a specific country or userbase that I could collect by having honeypots in various locations. I’m also interested to see the levels of activity in the various regions over time, which is what I’m going to get into next, starting with the NYC honeypot.

Some quick notes on how this data was obtained and graphed – I have my Dionaea honeypots set up to store data in sqlite databases. There are a few options out these for graphing (e.g., there’s a recipe in the Malware Analyst’s Cookbook for using gnuplot) but I used DionaeaFR. I thought that the best instructions for setting this up were found at Koen Van Impe’s site but even so I had some issues as far as getting it to run on my system. What I ultimately did was follow those instructions but use the most up to date versions of the dependencies (such as nodejs) when I did my install as the exact instructions posted there didn’t work on my system. I also ran “npm install -g promise” in addition to installing less as this was mentioned on another website.

New York City
Connections: 617,440
Unique IPs: 12,586
Files Downloaded: 48

grab2

grab3
Since this is my first time doing this, I don’t have much to compare these results with, however that seems like a LOT of connections. I’m not shocked to see that most of the connections came from the United States but it was interesting to see that the most unique IP addresses came from France, Spain and the USA. For all that activity, not too many binaries recovered, but even so I’m backed up on analysis. Romania was unexpected (0.71% of the total IPs).
grab4

A mix of services, but interesting to see that the vast majority of activity came in over UPnP.

grab5
Therefore, I suppose it’s not a shock that the most activity also came through port 1900, the UDP port for UPnP.

grab6
The top IP address (with 80,000 connections) can be linked back to Tinet in Germany, though I’m not getting much out of this whois record, just info about Tinet. VirusTotal finds no domains resolving to that IP address and actually puts it in France. Similarly, the next one on the list, 84.16.14.189, links back to Telefonica in Spain (VirusTotal also has not resolved anything to this address, though it does not find any location info on this IP). This isn’t showing too much, as it’s sort of the equivalent of tracing an IP back to Level III or Comcast. The ninth IP on the list, 185.62.190.87, lists info as BlazingFast LLC in Kiev Oblast, Ukraine. They seem to be a hosting provider, maybe I should set up a honeypot with them…nothing about this IP address in VirusTotal. Not much comes up about any of these addresses.

Here’s a map showing the attacker locations:

grab7

Next is the Frankfurt honeypot – It’s interesting that this honeypot was created several days after the NYC honeypot, and yet it had more activity (but fewer files downloaded).

Frankfurt
Connections: 702,786
Unique IPs: 10,896
Files Downloaded: 35

grab8

grab9

Pretty similar proportions to the stats from the NYC honeypot. There’s a certain country that doesn’t show up on either graph, which is surprising. Maybe it’s lumped into “others”, but keep in mind that the lowest ranks on this graph make up less than 1% (e.g., Germany on this chart is only 0.91%) so I’m surprised that these others ranked high enough to show up here.

Services is really very similar to the NYC results, UPnP being the most popular by a huge margin, along with port 1900:

grab10

grab11

Looking at the IP addresses from Frankfurt, there are several overlaps, either in terms of the same IP or just the same subnet. Only 204.88.128.14 and 213.140.43.126 are new.

grab12

204.88.128.14 is interesting – its whois record says “Santa Clara County Office of Education” in San Jose, CA. I’m wondering why so many connections would be coming from here? Some searching showed that someone’s already added this IP to FireHOL’s blocklist. I wonder what the story is with this one. 213.140.43.126 is just another Telefonica IP address, nothing too interesting there.

Here’s another map of the attackers, with an alternate view of the same data as well:

grab13

grab14

I’m FRIENDLY-SCANNER, and so can you

Posted on July 5, 2016 - July 29, 2016 by rhyolite

For the TL;DR on setting up Dionaea, see below

Lately I’ve been pretty disappointed in the kinds of attachments I’ve been receiving in my various emailboxes. Adwind (both iterations) was pretty interesting to see, but I’m noticing that a lot of what I receive is just a more formatted, fancier 419 scam. I’m basically just seeing various versions of “I’m a Nigerian oil minister, please send me your bank details” in a document attachment. I’ve actually even gotten one sender to resend their attachment as a PowerPoint file.

A couple of things occur to me, one is that these might be files that take advantage of vulnerabilities in older versions of the software that I am running, so when I open them on my current test environments I’m not really seeing anything happen. Going forward I’m going to run much older versions of my applications to see if anything different happens. For instance, I just put Acrobat Reader 5.0 on one of my testing VMs and used that to open a recent attachment during examination (though nothing happened with this ancient version of Acrobat, either). Another explanation is that these might just be exactly what they appear to be — prettier versions of the same crap that fills my inbox on a daily basis, but not much more than that.

I think it’s OK to continue checking my email attachments for stuff to analyze, but I also recognize that I need better samples, ideally Windows executables which I’m more knowledgeable about than documents. I decided to try setting up a honeypot to see if I could get anything interesting. I ran into various roadblocks along the way before I got something up and running, but hopefully detailing what happened might help others avoid some of these issues.

The first thing I noticed is the somewhat fragmented state of the various open-source honeypots out there. Dionaea was the most recommended one from various sources, but the original site (http://dionaea.carnivore.it/) is out of service and most material I managed to find about the software was from several years ago. I tried another honeypot, Amun, but that seemed sort of defunct at this point also. The last update (from 2012) stated that it was still being maintained, but the documentation section had most of the links struck out so it was a bit hard to figure out exactly what to do with it.

I decided to use my testing machine as the host for the honeypot since it’s already running Ubuntu. I got Amun set up on it and got it running, but strangely there seemed to be very little activity (something on the order of 3-4 pieces of traffic over a 2-3 day period). This seemed VERY strange to me — I was thinking that there would likely be hundreds of scans per day at least. I tried various things to get things working better:
– Disabled firewall on the host
– I thought that maybe there was some issue with NAT or something else, so I added the host machine to the router’s DMZ
– Temporarily disabling all security features on the router and observing if there were any changes
– I tried connecting the host directly to the cable modem here, not going through the router at all

Finally after about five days, I ended up with six scans. Something just didn’t seem right.

I decided that I would have to give Dionaea a try. Installing using repositories didn’t work, so I had to find out everything I’d need to install manually and then install from source. I’d also need to find the source since the main site wasn’t around anymore.

This site had the best set of Dionaea docs I could find. You can also find some info about using Dionaea in Malware Analyst’s Cookbook in the second chapter (specifically, recipes 2-4 through 2-9). I installed Dionaea from PhiBo’s github repository, however I also mirrored it to my newly created one since I feel like the world could always use more copies of this lying around.

Here are the steps I followed, largely following the instructions from the readthedocs.io link above. For the benefit of anyone who doesn’t do this often (or maybe is doing this for the first time), I’m putting explicit directions on what commands to enter:

Update packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

If you don’t already have it installed, install git:
```
sudo apt-get install git
```

Install all Dionaea dependencies (note the one in bold — if you try to install the original libnl-dev mentioned in the docs you’ll get an error about it not existing, but you can use libnl-3-dev instead):

sudo apt-get install \
    autoconf \
    automake \
    build-essential \
    check \
    cython3 \
    libcurl4-openssl-dev \
    libemu-dev \
    libev-dev \
    libglib2.0-dev \
    libloudmouth1-dev \
    libnetfilter-queue-dev \
    libnl-3-dev \
    libpcap-dev \
    libssl-dev \
    libtool \
    libudns-dev \
    python3 \
    python3-dev \
    python3-yaml \

Put the repository in /opt/dionaea (use either of the repositories above, as an example I’ll use the one I created):
```
sudo git clone git://github.com/BYEMAN/dionaea.git /opt/dionaea
```

Run the following commands:

cd /opt/dionaea

sudo autoreconf -vi

sudo ./configure \
 --disable-werror \
 --prefix=/opt/dionaea \
 --with-python=/usr/bin/python3 \
 --with-cython-dir=/usr/bin \
 --with-ev-include=/usr/include \
 --with-ev-lib=/usr/lib \
 --with-emu-lib=/usr/lib/libemu \
 --with-emu-include=/usr/include \
 --with-nl-include=/usr/include \
 --with-nl-lib=/usr/lib

sudo make

sudo make install

To start an instance of Dionaea, you can just run it as a super user but I typically run it as a daemon and put the PID in a file, as suggested in the Malware Analyst’s Cookbook
```
sudo /opt/dionaea/bin/dionaea -p /opt/dionaea/var/dionaea.pid -D
```
That should be all you need to do in order to get the software itself running. How it works for you once up and running is another topic.

Shortly after getting the honeypot running, I noticed LOTS of logging activity and within about 5 hours I observed 2700 scans had come in. Obviously much different than with Amun. Not sure why this happened, but I also didn’t look into it since I was just happy to have a honeypot up and running.

After a couple of days, I had collected lots of traffic and recorded many sessions but didn’t manage to collect any binaries, which is really what I’m after here. I did some reading online and I saw some suggestions that quite often any binaries come in over the ports for SMB (445) and MSMQ (1801 and others). Googling revealed that my ISP blocks these ports for residential customers (though not for business users), and checking with canyouseeme.org confirmed that my machine was unreachable through these ports. I needed to get something, somewhere that would allow me to run the honeypot without these restrictions.

Someone I know recommended getting something on Digital Ocean and setting up a honeypot there. I signed up with them and so far I have to tell you that I’m pretty thrilled with them. I got the cheapest “droplet” which comes to $5 a month, and set it up with Ubuntu 16.04 and the honeypot. You can confirm what ports are open on their systems with ping.eu, but I also emailed their support before I signed up and got the following response:

We do have a few restrictions, on UDP port 80 traffic, and SMTP over IPv6, both to prevent abuse and which cannot be lifted. Otherwise, we don’t any network restrictions, so as long as your software is compatible with the Linux or FreeBSD distributions that we offer, it should run just fine.

Another thing that I thought was nice about them is that you can locate your droplet in datacenters in various parts of the world. I picked one in NYC, but I’m thinking about getting some set up in other regions to see if I get different traffic there. If you want to sign up, use this link and you’ll get $10 in credit from Digital Ocean assuming you’re new to them.

I spent an evening getting my droplet set up and installing Dionaea, and then let it run overnight. At 0753 the next morning:

ls-l

And look how it begins:

Nice.

Oh yeah, referring to the title — one of the first scans I received was from something identifying itself as “FRIENDLY-SCANNER”. Seems legit.