Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

How to produce AfterGlow diagrams from Cowrie

I’ve been receiving a few questions on how to produce the AfterGlow diagrams from Cowrie logs, described in an earlier blog post. Instead of repeating myself through email requests, an explanation here will be better. First of all, you will need to decide what you want to visualize. Showing the different attackers targeting a Cowrie […]

Probes towards TCP/37777

Seems a new bot, possibly a strain of Mirai, is in the wild, targeting TCP port 37777. The last 24 hours I’ve seen close to 200 different IP addresses trying to connect to this port. DShield is also registering an increase. At the moment I can only guess what kind of product they’re probing for, […]

A different kind of Christmas scan

Those familiar with port scanning tools (like nmap), have probably heard of the Xmas scan option. This scanning strategy sets some unusual TCP flags, as the man page describes it: Sets the FIN, PSH, and URG flags, lighting the packet up like a Christmas tree. Yesterday, my firewall was systematically scanned with a combination of […]

TCP/7547 on the rise

Since yesterday I’ve registered a significant increase in probes for TCP port 7547. Over the last 12 hours, more than 1000 different IP addresses have tried to contact one of my networks. 1000 probes is of course no big deal, but the port that’s suddenly become of interest can be. The image below shows the […]

Beneficial side effects of running a honeypot

I’ve been running a honeypot for quite a while now, it started out as a pure SSH honeypot – first with Kippo and then I migrated to Cowrie. Some time later I added more honeypot services to the unit in the form of InetSim. The InetSim software provides multiple plaintext services like HTTP, FTP, and […]

Near-realtime blacklist warnings with NetFlow, Perl and OTX

Installing IDS sensors in your network for monitoring traffic is not always feasible, for several possible reasons. Perhaps the network infrastructure is too complex, leading to blind spots. Maybe the affected network links have higher capacity than your ad hoc IDS sensor, causing packet loss on the sensor. Or your company may be organized in […]

The inherent risks of visualizing firewall probes

For some time now, I’ve been graphing all unsolicited network traffic destined for my network. For instance, it’s quite useful for detecting slow scans, which will show up as the diagonally aligned green scatter points in this plot (click to enlarge). Other scans and probes often happen faster, when the attacker isn’t much concerned about […]

SSH outbound connections – what are they trying?

Still fascinated by the outbound connection attempts from my Cowrie honeypot, I’ve been looking into what the intruders are trying to obtain with the outbound connections. As previously mentioned, there are bots actively attempting outbound connections towards a lot of remote services. Most are simply TCP socket connection attempts, but now and again the connection […]

Visualizing honeypot activity, part II: Tree maps

In some earlier posts, I’ve written about bots bruteforcing their way into my Cowrie honeypot, and trying to establish outbound tunnels from there. While regular honeypot activity will often produce interesting logs of intrusion attempts and malware downloads, this kind of monotonous activity is less interesting from an analysis-point-of-view. However, the activity is still interesting […]

Threat intelligence: OTX, Bro, SiLK, BIND RPZ, OSSEC

Building a toolbox around threat intelligence can be done with freely available tools. Shared information about malicious behaviour allows you to detect and sometimes prevent activity from – and to – Internet resources that could compromise your systems’ security. I’ve already described how to use lists of malicious domain names in a BIND RPZ (Response […]