After a slower than usual start, this years Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student applications period closed at 19:00 UTC on Friday April 6th, with a major application rush in the last couple of days which kept us busy right up to the deadline! Many thanks to all the interested students who applied, and our mentors and org admins for taking the time to respond to students on IRC, email and through Melange. Even if you don’t get accepted as student for GSoC 2012 with the Honeynet Project, please do consider trying to work on your chosen project and becoming part of our community anyway, as we are all volunteers and would be happy to welcome and support you too.

If you have been following our blog you’ll know that the Honeynet Project was very happy to have been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2012.

If you are a student interested in applying to the Honeynet Project, the student application deadline is 19:00 UTC on Friday April 6th. So with 3 days to go, you need to be planning on submitting your project application via the Melange system soon. To avoid disappointment, please don’t leave your application until the last minute - you can edit as often as you want before the deadline.

On March 31, 2012, the Honeynet Project published a draft Code of Conduct and a statement about Ethics in Computer Security Research: Kelihos.B/Hlux.B botnet takedown.

The initial draft of the Code of Conduct was drawn from concepts described in the The Menlo Report: Ethical Principles Guiding Information and Communication Technology Research that was published in the United States Federal Register on December 28, 2011 for public comment. The Code of Conduct was refined through discussion within the Legal and Ethics Committee and volunteer Honeynet Project members to help make it workable within the structure of the Honeynet Project membership for evaluating the ethics of future research activities.

Earlier, we posted about our operation on the Kelihos.B/Hlux.B botnet takedown that was conducted with by security experts from Dell SecureWorks, CrowdStrike, Kaspersky, and the Honeynet Project. On initial view, the operation seems very clear cut: the bad guys are running a botnet that is doing havoc on the Internet; on the other side, are the good guys that have found a way to disable the botnet.

The situation is much more nuanced. The Honeynet Project has been conducting security research for over a decade now and since our early days, we made it a priority to balance benefit and risks in our research. You can trace this back to when the Honeynet Project first defined “data control” as one of the requirements for honeynet/honeypot deployments. The purpose of data control was to minimize potential harm to others resulting from honeypots, which by their nature are vulnerable systems we expect to be compromised and used by malicious actors.

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.

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 !

Rapid7 Sponsors Androguard and Cuckoo Sandbox in the First Round of the Magnificent7 Program
Cuckoo Sandbox
AndroGuard

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. Critics of earlier such actions who decried them as “vigilantism”, said this was an incomplete takedown of the entire population of Zeus botnets, or had little impact on delivery of spam after a takedown, do not understand some subtle points about these actions. And they fail to learn some lessons from them.

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 [email protected] 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.