honeynets

Together with a few researchers from China, we studied IRC-based botnets in order to understand the extent of this phenomenon. Using different kinds of honeypots and several sensors deployed across different regions in China, we were able to collect thousands of bot binaries. With the help of a behavior-based analysis mechanism similar to CWSandbox, we could extract the Command & Control (C&C) server in an automated way. In a third step, we used this information to connect to the actual C&C server and passively monitored the activity in the channel. Furthermore, we also actively probed the C&C servers to find out other characteristics of these machines. The complete setup and our results are described in a technical report we just published.

Abstract:

Botnets, networks of compromised machines that can be remotely controlled by an attacker, are one of the most common attack platforms nowadays. They can, for example, be used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal sensitive information, or send spam emails. A long-term measurement study of botnet activities is useful as a basis for further research on global botnet mitigation and disruption techniques. We have built a distributed and fully-automated botnet measurement system which allows us to collect data on the botnet activity we observe in China. Based on the analysis of tracking records of 3,290 IRC-based botnets during a period of almost twelve months, this paper presents several novel results of botnet activities which can only be measured via long-term easurements. These include. amongst others, botnet lifetime, botnet discovery trends and distributions, command and control channel distributions, botnet size and end-host distributions. Furthermore, our measurements confirm and extend several previous results from this area.

Our results show that the botnet problem is of global scale, with a scattered distribution of the control infrastructure and also a scattered distribution of the victims. Furthermore, the control infrastructure itself is rather flexible, with an average lifetime of a Command & Control server of about 54 days. These results can also leverage research in the area of botnet detection, mitigation, and disruption: only by understanding the problem in detail, we can develop efficient counter measures.

The complete report is available as TR-2007-010. And more information regarding the Chinese Honeynet Project is available at the website of the Artemis Project.

The status report of the Honeynet Project for the fiscal year 2007 is online since a couple of days. It contains an overview of what the Honeynet Project has done in the past year, together with links to the status report of each chapter. If you want to know what was done during the last couple of months, this is a good starting point.

Christian Seifert just mailed me and told me about the new release of Capture-HPC. Lots of new features are included in the release, which, hopefully, lowers the bar to get into research about malicious servers as well as expand the possibilities of the research... Here a (partial) list of specific new features:

• support for any client application that is http protocol aware (for example, Microsoft Excel)


• ability to automatically collect malware


• ability to automatically collect network traffic on the client


• ability to push exclusion lists from the Capture Server to the Capture Client


• improved control of Internet Explorer: obtain HTML error codes; specify visitation delay after page has been retrieved; retry visitation of URLs in case of time outs or network errors, ...


• support for plug-in architecture, that allows to create fine grained control of clients (for example, as provided for Internet Explorer), but also allows for integration of client applications that require complex interactions to retrieve content from the web ( e.g. Safari is such an application. It doesn't allow retrieval of web content by passing the URL as a parameter)

The tool and the source code are available from https://www.client-honeynet.org/creleases.html.

The Honeynet Project & Research Alliance are excited to announce the release of a new paper in our Know Your Enemy series, "KYE: Malicious Web Servers". In this paper, we take an in-depth look at malicious web servers that attack web browsers, and we evaluate several defensive strategies that can be employed to counter this threat of client-side attacks. All the malicious web servers identified in this study were found with our client honeypot Capture-HPC.

Besides providing the information of this paper, we also publish the complete data set. We hope that Capture-HPC and the data enable the security community to easily become involved in studying the phenomenon of malicious servers.

A few days ago, Michael Müter released an update of his implementation for the diploma thesis on web-decoys at http://hihat.sourceforge.net/.

Features: HIHAT ...

• automatically scans for known attacks.


• provides an overview mode which allows you to look for new incidents quickly.


• supports detailed information about all data correlated with every access to the honeypot.


• This includes but is not limited to HTTP-GET, HTTP-POST and COOKIE data.


• saves copies of malicious tools in a secured place for later analysis.


• provides a geographical, IP-based mapping about the attack sources.


• generates numerous statistics about all traffic recognized at the system.