The Honeynet Project

On Wednesday, March 21, 2012, an operation by security experts from Dell SecureWorks, CrowdStrike, Kaspersky, and the Honeynet Project was initiated to sinkhole infected computers in the Kelihos.B/Hlux.B botnet. The objective of this action was to remove from the attacker's control all computers currently infected with the Kelihos.B/Hlux.B malware by poisoning the peer lists and routing tables in the lower layers of command and control. This will prevent the botnet operator from doing any more harm with this set of infected computers.

Control of the botnet with over 129,000 infected hosts was successfully obtained. These bots are no longer in control of the botherder, and, as a result, are no longer involved in sending spam, the primary malicious activity of this botnet. The hosts resided primarily in Poland (24%) and were primarily running the old operating system Windows XP (84%). The command-and-control infrastructure has been abandoned by the gang that was operating the botnet two days after the operation. We can say that the Kelihos.B/Hlux.B botnet was successfully disabled.

For more information, we refer to:
http://blog.crowdstrike.com/2012/03/p2p-botnet-kelihosb-with-100000-nodes.html
http://newsroom.kaspersky.eu/en/texts/detail/article/how-kaspersky-lab-and-crowdstrike-dismantled-the-second-hluxkelihos-botnet-success-story/
http://www.secureworks.com/research/threats/waledac_kelihos_botnet/

We are proud and happy to announce that Cuckoo Sandbox and AndroGuard were choosen by Rapid7 for his Magnificent7 Program, an initiative created to fuel the success of seven bleeding edge open source projects and backed by a fund of $100,000.

Cuckoo Sandbox and AndroGuard are respectively developped by Claudio Guarnieri and Anthony Desnos and mentored during previous GSoC.

Congratulations to Claudio and Anthony !

On Sunday, March 25, Microsoft announced that for the fourth time, they had gone to a federal court and successfully obtained an ex parte temporary restraining order (TRO) to seize domain names from botnet operators. For the second time, the court has also ordered U.S. Marshals to accompany Microsoft and others to serve search warrants and seize evidence that can be used in future civil or criminal actions.

I am pleased to announce a new forensic challenge: Forensic Challenge 11 - "Dive Into Exploit"

The challenge has been created by Georg Wicherski from Giraffe Chapter.

Submission deadline is May 31th and we will be announcing winners (if any) around the last week of June 2012.

Have fun!

Angelo Dell'Aera
The Honeynet Project

I'm glad to announce I finally publicly released a brand new low-interaction honeyclient I'm working on from a few months now. The project name is Thug and it was publicly presented a few hours ago during the Honeynet Project Security Workshop in Facebook HQ in Menlo Park. Please take a look at the (attached) presentation for details about Thug.

Just a few highlights about Thug:

• DOM (almost) compliant with W3C DOM Core and HTML specifications (Level 1, 2 and partially 3) and partially compliant with W3C DOM Events and Style specifications

We have just been notified by Google that the Honeynet Project has - once again - been accepted as one of the mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2012 (in total 180 organizations were selected). We are very excited and are looking forward to a great summer! Already a big thank you to Google for their continued support!

While student applications are not officially open yet, interested students are encouraged to check out our ideas page and get in contact with us via gsoc@public.honeynet.org and/or IRC (#gsoc2012-honeynet on irc.freenode.net) in the next few ideas to meet the mentors and discuss project ideas. Student applications officially open on March 26th 2012 and close on April 6th 2012.

We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Last Friday was the deadline for GSoC 2012 Mentoring Organization Applications. After three successful participations in the Google Summer of Code program in 2009, 2010, and 2011, we - once again - applied to be part of GSoC again this year. Our experience with the program has been tremendous. We have been able to excite students worldwide (many which have gone on to become members of the Honeynet Project) for open-source development in the information security space and several of the leading honeynet open-source tools started with a GSoC project. We are looking forward to get students involved with our expert mentors again this year to tackle the many research and development problems still remaining in information security.

While we patiently await Google's response to our application (the list of list of officially accepted GSoC 2012 orgs is announced on March 16th 23:00 UTC, we urge you to check out our project ideas page for some suggestions of the type of projects we would like to mentor (although students can also suggest their own ideas too). You can start getting in contact with us on IRC and email to discuss potential project ideas (some of you are already are doing so, which is great). You can reach us at #gsoc2012-honeynet on irc.freenode.net as well as by joining our public GSoC ideas mailing list. We hope to hear from you!

A big thanks to Google for their continued support for FOSS. We hope we will be accepted to participate as a GSoC mentoring organization again this year and we are all looking forward to a productive and exciting GSoC 2012!

Frasier, who participated in our recent visualization forensic challenge has released his visualization tool WoLF Viz at http://code.google.com/p/wolf-viz/. WoLF Viz works by parsing arbitrary text log files into a network (graph) of words, where the words are nodes and the edges are adjacent word pairs. The edge weights are based on how often the two words are seen next to each other.

Early bird registration to our 2012 Honeynet Project Security Workshop ends today. The workshop will be held at the Facebook offices in the SF Bay Area. Secure your spot today for the workshop or one of the eleven hands-on training sessions we are offering. You can check out the agenda and training sessions at https://honeynet.org/SecurityWorkshops/2012_SF_Bay_Area. Hope to see you there!
Christian Seifert
CEO, The Honeynet Project

Folks,
Ben Reardon has judged all submissions and results have been posted on the challenge page. The winners are:

1. Fabian Fischer
2. Chris Horsley
3. Fraser Scott
4. Dan Gleebits
5. Johnathan Tracz

Take a look at Ben's blog post for additional details. Congratulations to the winners and thanks to the other participants!

Angelo Dell'Aera
The Honeynet Project