honeynets

The submissions deadline for the 3rd USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET '10) is quickly approaching. Please submit your work by Thursday, February 25, 2010, 11:59 p.m. PST. The full call for papers is available at http://www.usenix.org/events/leet10/cfp/, see an overview below:

Topics
Now in its third year, LEET continues to provide a unique forum for the discussion of threats to the confidentiality of our data, the integrity of digital transactions, and the dependability of the technologies we increasingly rely on. We encourage submissions of papers that focus on the malicious activities themselves (e.g., reconnaissance, exploitation, privilege escalation, rootkit installation, attack), our responses as defenders (e.g., prevention, detection, and mitigation), or the social, political, and economic goals driving these malicious activities and the legal and ethical codes guiding our defensive responses.

Overview
Information technology (IT) adds $2 trillion annually to the US economy alone. While these technologies have enabled significant global economic growth, they have become rich targets for malicious activity. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) indicated that cyber crime reached an all-time high in 2008; cyber crime now ranks as the FBI's third highest priority, behind such dramatic threats as counter-terrorism and counter-espionage. Much of this malicious activity is driven by economic incentives, but recently we have seen the emergence of highly visible, politically motivated attacks. While the motivations for malicious behavior and the technical mechanisms that enable them remain rich areas of research, it is clear that today our global society is faced with a wide range of cyber criminal activities: spam, phishing, denial of service, click fraud, etc.

Workshop Format
LEET aims to be a true workshop, with the twin goals of fostering the development of preliminary work and helping to unify the broad community of researchers and practitioners who focus on worms, bots, spam, spyware, phishing, DDoS, and the ever-increasing palette of large-scale Internet-based threats. Intriguing preliminary results and thought-provoking ideas will be strongly favored; papers will be selected for their potential to stimulate discussion in the workshop. Each author will have 15 minutes to present his or her work, followed by 15 minutes of discussion with the workshop participants.

Today I gave a talk at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) that focussed on some of the research I did in the past year. The slides are now available.

Abstract:
With the growing digital economy, it comes as no surprise that criminal activities in digital business have lead to a digital underground economy. Because it is such a fast-moving field, tracking and understanding this underground economy is difficult and most information in this area is vague. In this talk, we discuss several approaches to study the structure of these underground markets. In particular, we present a method with which it is possible to directly analyze the amount of data harvested through keylogger-based attacks in a highly automated fashion. Based on real-world data, we can get a glimpse into the digital underground economy. However, many open questions remain that will be discussed in the last part of the talk.

You can get the slides at http:///honeyblog.org/junkyard/presentations/10_underground-economy_ICSI.pdf.

The first challenge of the Honeynet Forensic Challenge 2010 has been posted at http://honeynet.org/node/504. The task is to analyze a packet capture that was collected by a honeypot. Analyze and answer the following questions:

1. Which systems (i.e. IP addresses) are involved? (2pts)
2. What can you find out about the attacking host (e.g., where is it located)? (2pts)
3. How many TCP sessions are contained in the dump file? (2pts)
4. How long did it take to perform the attack? (2pts)
5. Which operating system was targeted by the attack? And which service? Which vulnerability? (6pts)
6. Can you sketch an overview of the general actions performed by the attacker? (6pts)
7. What specific vulnerability was attacked? (2pts)
8. What actions does the shellcode perform? Pls list the shellcode. (8pts)
9. Do you think a Honeypot was used to pose as a vulnerable victim? Why? (6pts)
10. Was there malware involved? Whats the name of the malware? (We are not looking for a detailed malware analysis for this challenge) (2pts)
11. Do you think this is a manual or an automated attack? Why? (2pts)

Get the pcap at http://honeynet.org/files/attack-trace.pcap_.gz, they were provided together with the questions by Tillmann Werner. Deadline for submissions is Monday, February 1st 2010 at 17:00 EST. There will be some small prizes, among them signed copies of our book "Virtual Honeypots: From Botnet Tracking to Intrusion Detection". Full information is available at http://honeynet.org/node/504.

Finally, after several years without any Honeynet Project Challenges, there will finally be new Forensic Challenges starting next Monday (January 18th, 2010). Here is the official announcement:

I am very happy to announce the Honeynet Project Forensic Challenge 2010. The purpose of the Forensic Challenges is to take learning one step farther. Instead of having the Honeynet Project analyze attacks and share their findings, Forensic Challenges give the security community the opportunity to analyze attacks and share their findings. In the end, individuals and organizations not only learn about threats, but also learn how to analyze them. Even better, individuals can access the write-ups from other individuals, and learn about new tools and techniques for analyzing attacks. Best of all, the attacks of the Forensic Challenge are attacks encountered in the wild, real hacks, provided by our members.
It has been several years since we provided Forensic Challenges and with the Forensic Challenge 2010, we will provide desperately needed upgrades. The Forensic Challenge 2010 will include a mixture of server-side attacks on the latest operating systems and services, attacks on client-side attacks that emerged in the past few years, attacks on VoiP systems, web applications, etc. At the end of challenge, we will provide a sample solution created by our members using the state-of-the-art tools that are publicly available, such as libemu and dionaea.
The first challenge (of several for 2010) will be posted on our Forensic Challenges web site on Monday, January 18th 2010. We will be open to submissions for about two weeks and announce the winners by February 15th 2010. This year, we will also award the top three submissions with prizes! Please check the web site on Monday, January 18th 2010 for further details….

Christian Seifert

Full details will be published at http://honeynet.org/challenges.

Update: The date was apparently wrong, I corrected it from January 15th to January 18th.

A new series of papers is available from the Honeynet Project: "Know Your Tools" deals with specific types of honeypots and explains how to use them. The first paper in this series deals with Picviz, a tool to visualize data based on parallel coordinates plots.

Picviz is a parallel coordinates plotter which enables easy scripting from various input (tcpdump, syslog, iptables logs, apache logs, etc..) to visualize data and discover interesting aspects of that data quickly. Picviz uncovers previously hidden data that is difficult to identify with traditional analysis methods.

The paper is available at http://www.honeynet.org/node/499".

Abstract:
This document explains how Picviz can be used to spot attacks. We will use three examples in this paper; analysis of ssh connection logs, demonstration of the graphical interface on network data generated by a port scanner and the use of Picviz command line to discover attacks towards an Apache web server. Picviz can handle large amounts of data, as illustrated by the last example in which two years of raw Apache access logs are analyzed. We will show how we can find attacks that previously have been hidden and discover them in a very short time!
We hope Picviz will make you more efficient in analyzing any kind of log files, including network traffic, and able to spot abnormalities even with large dataset.