Up to this point you hopefully have an understanding on how to get honeyd up and running on your preferred hardware while having the ability to run multiple honeypots in either a static or dhcp environment. Now that everything is running smoothly and you’ve successfully tested all connectivity you’ll probably want to start getting alerts from some of the honeypots you’ve setup and deployed. I’ve written a small python script that accomplishes this for me so hopefully my explanation of the setup will get you receiving email alerts as well.

So out of the box honeyd doesn’t natively support getting emails sent to you when your device is port scanned. I really wanted this feature but had to figure out the best way of determining when my honeypot was being scanned. Honeyd has the option of creating a log file so my first idea was to parse this file for items of interest. Below is the command I would use to launch honeyd with the logging option.

You should see similar output as below after running the above command.

So this just created a honeypot with the IP address of 192.168.134.147. From another machine let’s port scan our honeypot, to keep the output simple I’m only going to scan one port.

So port 135 is open so we know our configuration is working properly. Also honeyd will output information to the terminal letting you know that connections are being made to your honeypot. The information below was appended to the output from when we started honeyd.

On line three we see a connection request from 192.168.134.143 to our honeypot at 192.168.134.147 and the “:135″ after the IP address is the destination port so from this output we can verify everything is working and we’re getting the correct response from our port scan. You also see on line six that the connection from 192.168.134.143 to 192.168.134.147 was dropped. Now let’s take a look at our log file to see what kind of information about our port scan shows up. We’ll use the tail command in Linux, by default the tail command only shows the last 10 lines of a file although this can be adjusted.

In the log file we see very similar information on lines 5 and 6 as we did in the standard output of the terminal. Turns out there’s a third location of output that we could tap into. All processes in Linux will probably display some kind of information into one of two system log files. Either the /var/log/messages or the /var/log/syslog file. Different distros of Linux will put this information into different locations but for the backtrack distro I know it goes into /var/log/syslog. Let’s tail this file to see what kind of information it holds.

On lines 7 and 10 we see similar information as we’ve seen in other areas. So when I decided to build an email alert script I had three sources of information I could pull from. I eventually went with combing through /var/log/syslog but I could have easily went a different route. For me /var/log/syslog seem to have more verbosity and better keywords but then again that’s just my opinion. My next step was to write a script that would parse /var/log/syslog then generate an email alert when it saw connections to my honeypot. I wrote my script in Python because I’m most familiar with that language and Python comes installed by default on most Linux distributions so whatever distro you decide to run honeyd on it’s more than likely Python will already be installed on that same operating system.

Before you implement any scripted email solution it’s a good idea to test email functionality with a small email script just to ensure you can properly communicate and receive email alerts. To do this you’ll need to know the name (FQDN) of your SMTP email server. You can usually find them in your email client. For Outlook you can go to File > Account Settings > Account Settings > Email tab > click on Change, there you’ll see the name of your organizations smtp server. Typically it’ll be something simple, if the email of your organization ends in example.com then your smtp server will likely be smtp.example.com. SMTP servers are usually configured to send emails in one of two ways, authenticated or unauthenticated. We’ll look at examples for both. The first example below is a python script of sending authentication credentials along with the request, in this particular I’m sending the alert to my gmail account.

Hopefully some of this script is easy to figure out, the main thing you need to be concerned with is lines 11,12, and 15. Lines 11 and 12 hold the username and password you’ll need to authenticate to your smtp server and line 15 is the name of your smtp server. More than likely your internal smtp server will not require authentication if that’s the case simply remove lines 11,12,16, and 17 from the script above. If you’re not sure first send the test email without authentication and if you get the error message “smtplib.SMTPSenderRefused” then more than likely you’ll need to provide credentials. If everything goes smooth running your test email script then you should see the output below, here I’ve named my script test.py.

Next you can implement the full email alerting script. Simply copy and paste the script below into your text editor of choice and name the script, I’ve named my alert.py.

I’m not a developer and I always mangle my scripts together so this isn’t the prettiest code. I’ll give you a run down of what this script does, if you have any specific questions please feel free to leave a comment I generally respond to comments fairly quickly. Basically the script combs through /var/log/syslog looking for the string “Connection request”. I’ve also confirmed that this script works just as well combing through /var/log/messages, you’ll have to verify which log your Linux distro is dumping this information. To test the script to make sure it works I would first port scan your honeypot from another device then simply run the python script to see if you get no errors and hopefully you get an email in your inbox, just run the following command after you’ve port scanned your honeypot.

This command should only run for maybe 10 seconds then return you to the command line. If you get any errors then you’ll have to trouble shoot the script, contact me if you need help with that. Just to give you an idea of what the email alert would look like I’ve got a screen shot of an alert I got sent to my gmail address below.

Currently the script only looks for “Connection request” in the last five minutes of log files so you’ll need to combo that up with running the script every five minutes, this can be done with Linux’s crontab. Cron can schedule programs to be run at certain frequencies. To set up alert.py to run every five minutes use the crontab command.

This opens up a text file in the terminal where you enter a specific syntax to tell cron which program you want to run and how often. Enter the text below to tell cron to run alert.py every five minutes.

Then use control+w to save your work and control+x to quit the text editor. So in the alert.py script the every five minutes comes from line 33 where 300 is seconds which equals five minutes so if you wanted to modify the time you could do it on that line. Another line in the script you may want to change is line 25, here you can add any IP’s that you want to ignore for whatever reason. You’ll definitely want to change line 55 that has the text of the email you’ll be receiving and customize that to your hearts content. Don’t forget to modify smtp server information and also remove or change the authentication piece as needed. Also in the screenshot you’ll notice that the device is “bt” which is short for backtrack. I implemented this feature because you may want to run honeyd on multiple devices throughout your network and you’ll want to know what device is sending you the email. The name of the device is determined in lines 17-20. You may have to modify that code because not all distros of Linux keep their hostname in that location and you may have to parse the text file that holds that hostname in a different manner. There’s more information that I could go into about the script but hopefully I’ve hit the major points if there’s something I missed or if you have any questions or feedback please leave comments.

The first thing you’ll need to do is discover IP addresses that have mssql running. So you’ll accomplish this by running some type of scan. The scanner of choice is always nmap but there are some things you’ll need to consider when scanning for mssql. The default port for mssql is 1433 but just like with any service it can listen any port. So for starters it’s definitely a good idea to scan an IP range looking for port 1433.

Step 1 scan for port 1433, this can be done using the following nmap command.

This will only scan for port 1433 on host 130-140, your IP range will vary. My output is below.

In this case the 131 host port is closed but the 132 host has port 1433 open. So great success we’ve found a box running mssql. Hold your horses because this is simply the beginning. If you’re scanning is focused then this type of scan is fine, meaning I’m not scanning thousands of hosts I’m only focused on a handful of hosts. If I’m only concerned about scanning a handful of hosts then my next step would be to determine two things.

1. Version of the database
2. Are there any other additional listening ports for this database

To determine the version of the database we can once again turn to nmap.

The “-A” option will try and determine as much information as it can about the service on port 1433 in this case. The “-A” option will also try and determine the underlying OS running as well. Below is the output from this scan.

So you’ll notice in the output nmap is reporting the version of mssql to be SQL Server 2005 which is correct in this case. Knowing the version is very important because different versions of SQL Server provide different security features and also have different vulnerabilities. There are other ways of determining the version of sql server without authenticating but to me nmap is the best solution.

Next let’s talk about looking for other ports that mssql may be listening on. For multiple reasons, like load balancing, mssql can listen on multiple ports. When pen testing mssql we want to know what those ports are so we can bang against them. Depending on the configuration you can authenticate to every listening mssql port. One thing to keep in mind is that you can authenticate to mssql using your normal windows / network / active directory credentials or you can authenticate using an account that was setup on the mssql server. This is basically known as windows authentication or sql authentication. When setting up the sql server and ports the database administrator will have to configure on how this authentication takes place. The easier target is using sql credentials as those are typically configured with a weaker password policy. Now that I’ve discussed some of the issues let’s get cracking. So to determine additional ports that a database may be running on we’ll once again turn to nmap. This time I told mssql to also listen on port 1444 and 1433.

So now go ahead and run the same nmap command as before.

So we see that nmap reports back ports 1444 and 1433 are listening. You may be wondering how nmap knew that port 1444 was open. MSSQL runs a service called the “browser service” which runs on port 1434 and uses UDP instead of TCP. If this browser service wasn’t running nmap wouldn’t be able to pull this information. Basically nmap queries port 1434 asking for any other instances that are running on different ports. It does this using the mssql nmap script. There are a couple of other tools here and here that do the same thing but I stick with nmap since it’s already baked in. So the browser service and additional ports is a very important to keep in mind when pen testing mssql.

Now we have more information about our target which hopefully means we’ll find a weak spot that we can exploit. Once you know the version it’s always recommended to search CVE (common vulnerabilities and weaknesses) and it may also not be a bad idea to search inside the metasploit tool as well. There aren’t a whole lot of remote code execution vulnerabilities for anything SQL Server 2005 and beyond but it’s always worth checking just to make sure. So if they aren’t running an old unpatched version of mssql then that means you’ll need credentials to authenticate to the sql server. This means we’ll need to try and brute force the credentials. The main tool I like to use to perform brute force attacks is medusa, another good alternative is hydra. I have had different degrees of luck with both tools so it may be useful to run both tools although my default is medusa. I will only cover how to use medusa, below is the typical command line options that you feed into medusa.

The -h is the host, the -U is the username list, -P is the password list, -O is the output file, -M is the module you want to run against in this case it’s mssql. Below is the output of this command.

Your output file resemble the following.

The file output is much easier to parse and we can see in the next to last line that it was successful in finding credentials of username = sa and password = password. By default medusa will run against the standard port which is 1433 in this case, if you want medusa to run against a non standard port you’ll need to include the “-n” option.

So you see that medusa was able to authenticate to port 1444 with the same username and password. This may not always be the case. With mssql you can configure different ports with different credentials so it’s always best to run a brute force tool like medusa on each individual port and see if you get any hits. Medusa and hydra can take a while to run in my case I had a very small dictionary seen below.

Large dictionaries can take some time to run so keep that in mind when you’re brute forcing using these kinds of tools. So we got lucky and we credentials for a mssql database, that’s awesome but it’s just another step in the process. Going forward we have a couple of options. As a true attacker you would consider the following options.

1. Plunder the database for information
2. Use your credentials to gain further access (e.g. administrator on the underlying operating system)
3. Start serving up malware for potential victims

I’m not going to touch on the third option but I will discuss the first and second option. So for the first option once we have credentials we can start to query the database. In this scenario I’ve got the best kind of credentials you can ask for on a mssql database which is the “sa” user. This will not always be the case but it’s the example I’ve chosen to follow. One good thing to run with credentials is metasploit’s enum tool. This module basically gives you an overview of the sql server configuration and some note worthy security related configurations. Below is how to use mssql_enum.

Below is the output of running the tool.

I’m not going to go through this entire output but all of it is relevant to security configuration. Things to note are permissions which the service runs as, password settings (e.g. account lock outs, password expiration), and stored procedures that are available. You can read more about stored procedures but the main thing to know is that they extend the functionality of mssql by giving easy access to common tasks such as granting access to a database. The one stored procedure every pen tester wants access to is the mighty xp_cmdshell which allows you to execute operating system commands with a database call. So information that you can obtain, xp_cmdshell enabled or disabled, about the database will help you to further assess or pen test the setup. Going forward it’s best to have some sort of mssql client so that you can make sql queries to the database. I’m a fan of keeping things lightweight so I prefer command line clients and not GUI (graphical user interface) clients. So for accessing mssql from Linux I recommend sqsh and as for accessing from a windows PC I like the Microsoft SQL Server Command Line Utilities which will first require an install of the Microsoft SQL Server Native Client, both microsoft tools can be found here. Now we’ll get items of interest such as stored procedures but first let’s use one of the clients mentioned to access and run some sql queries. The syntax for both clients is very similar but first let’s look at the microsoft client. You’ll first need to change to the proper folder where the sql client was installed.

So to connect to 192.168.134.132 run the following command.

Below are the basic options for this command

After you’ve run the above command you should see the following.

So the “1>” is the prompt where you will enter your sql commands, let’s just run a basic sql query to confirm everything works, we’ll query for the version in this case.

So after typing your sql query you’ll be dropped down to your second prompt “2>” there you will need to type “go” and hit enter for it to run your query. Running the sqsh client you’ll get similar results.

Just type “exit” if you want to leave the client. Another thing to note is the help menu for both commands. Below is the help command for sqsh.

Help for sqlcmd.exe

One thing that might not be very clear from the help output is how you would connect to a different port. By default both of these clients connect on port 1433, if you want to connect to a different port you’ll have to use the following syntax.

So getting the versions of the database proves that our clients are working correctly and we have access, next we’ll focus on sql queries that will extract some useful information that a pen tester could leverage.
Determine the current user

Create user “travis” with password “secret”

Or another way

Create a table named pwned

Determine current database

List all databases

Determine host name of PC the database is installed on

Determine users with sysadmin rights

Add user travis to the sysadmin role

Now as an attacker I mentioned the three basic options of plunder database, use credentials for further access, and hosting malware. The commands above are examples of “plundering” the database and these commands merely scratch the surface. Another plundering idea would be to search all databases for “items of interest”. Once you have credentials to the database you have plenty of options for plundering. The second step I mentioned was using your credentials for further access. Two things come to my mind which is cracking sql passwords and gaining access to the underlying OS that hosts the database. An attacker would want to know sql passwords because often those passwords are reused. That reuse includes other databases and possibly other credentials such as active directory credentials. The other piece of gaining access to the underlying OS of the database will allow you to do a number of things such as key logging, searching the file system, pass the hash technique, etc. So I’ll first discuss how to crack the encrypted passwords inside of a mssql database. Just so we’re on the same page a password is not supposed to be stored in clear text in a database is suppose to be stored encrypted as a cryptographic hash. Cryptographic hash is a fancy way of saying that the password cannot be easily determined and they encrypted value is commonly referred as a hash, not to be confused with the delicious food. So the next step is to get these hashes and crack’em.

Extract username and password hashes

You should see something like the following

Now you can take that password hash and feed it into a password cracker such as john the ripper but before you do that you’ll need to add a zero plus X “0x” to the beginning of the password hash. This needs to be done because john the ripper expects password hashes in certain formats and if you need to know what that format is for various types of hash functions then pentestmonkey is a good resource for this type of information. So your modified hash with zero plus X in front should look like the following.

Now put that into a text file so we can feed it to john the ripper, in this case I named it mssqlHash.txt. Next all you have to do is use the command “john” along with the file that contains the password hashes as below.

Here john the ripper was able to crack this hash and determined the password was “secret”. So now that you’ve cracked some passwords on this database there’s a good chance that username and password will work on other databases within the environment you’re testing. Seeing how server and database admins like to keep things together that same username and password will probably work on another machine on the same vlan so just start nmap scanning to find those open ports then add the username and password you found into your medusa dictionary then let medusa do it’s brute forcing and hopefully you’ll find another database you can gain access to.

The last technique I’ll discuss is gaining access to the underlying operating system that the database is running on. Having sysadmin credentials on the database is awesome but having admin on the underlying operating system is even better. As I mentioned before the stored procedure xp_cmdshell is the best way to gain this kind of access but as you can see from the metasploit enum module xp_cmdshell isn’t always at our disposal. The xp_cmdshell was enabled by default on mssql 2000 but mssql 2005 and beyond by default does not enable this stored procedure. Even so a mssql 2000 database administrator could disable it as well. One way and maybe the easiest way is to use metasploits mssql_payload module to enable the xp_cmdshell and give you a meterpreter shell back. Below is the command you’ll need to run. You have to set at least the host you’re targeting (rhost) and the password of the “sa” account. This module will not work unless the user you’re authenticating with has sysadmin credentials, so the account doesn’t have to be “sa” but it has to be a user with a sysadmin role.

So at this point we have a meterpreter command prompt on the target computer which is better than a regular windows command prompt. From here we can launch a number of attacks. I’m not going to touch on those for that just simply google “post exploitation” to get an idea of what you may want to accomplish next. At this point its a good idea to make sure you’re on the right computer and determine the types of credentials we have on our target machine. The following commands will determine that information.

So we’re on the correct computer and we have “system” credentials which is the highest credentials you can have on a windows platform. Great success. At the heart of this metasploit module is some sql commands that will enable the xp_cmdshell. If you wanted to manually enable xp_cmdshell you could enter the sql commands below.

That’s all folks, more could be covered here but this will get you started. Once again I haven’t covered anything new here and this documentation is meant to capture some of the common tasks that need to be completed when testing mssql. Hope this helps and happy mssql hunting.

If you’re going to use honeyd to detect attackers on your local network then you’ll need to place your honeypot as close to your networking equipment as possible. This being the case a racked server or small device with numerous network interfaces will likely be the best solution. A racked server didn’t make much sense for my solution mainly due to the cost but a small embedded device would need good specs to make a good solution. I found a couple of solutions.

First the option that I went with to implement my honeypot running honeyd. The Soekris Net5501.

The great thing about the Soekris is that it has four network interfaces. This allows you access to four different vlans within your environment. Out of the box it comes with the ability to load an OS on compact flash, which is the option that I went with. You could also get a PCI extension that could be fitted with a hard drive. If your install of a honeypot would require large data storage then you’ll need to think about that option. I did not care about data storage, I simply wanted an alert when honeyd saw something come across the wire. Besides even if you needed storage you could have honeyd ship off that data / logs to a centralized location. For $250 bucks this is a great solution. You won’t find to many small devices like this that have four network interfaces. Now you could get a full rack system with plenty of network interfaces but then your cost goes up. More network interfaces would mean that you have access to more vlans so if that’s important to you then you’ll have to plan accordingly. This is setup is not meant to cover your entire organization just a handful of important vlans. Below is a diagram of a potential setup.

In this setup you can place a honeyd host on four different vlans looking for any devices that connect to your honeypot when they should have no business connecting to your honeypot. Keep in mind this is not meant to be an intrusion detection replacement. This solution will ride on top of your existing intrusion detection. Besides most intrusion detection setups that I’ve seen don’t monitor activity inside a particular vlan much less traffic between vlans. The setup I’ve described here is meant to monitor vlans with important assests and data. So in the scenario above you would have to connect your Soekris device to a “core” router that has the vlans you want to monitor. You could also connect the Soekris device to multiple routers if those vlans are mananged by different routers. There are numerous ways to tackle a problem that I’ve described but this is just one of those ways.

There is another device that I believe is very handy in these types of situations and that’s the Alix boards by PC Engines. If you want to buy one I would recomend NetGate which also has other options such as enclosures and lots of other wireless goodness. The Alix board plus enclosure is very small, about the same size of a home wireless router. Below is an Alix board without the enclosure.

You can buy them with a number of configurations, the one above has three network interfaces, one compact flash, one mini pci, plus a cpu and RAM. So no hard drive but you can easily run your OS on the compact flash. Of course the OS of choice should be Linux. Hopefully this answers the question as to what hardware you might could use for your installation of a honeypot in your organization’s environment. Unless you do everything at your organization this type of work will require you to work closely with your network engineering team. That’s all I have, I’d love to hear from others on how they have their honeypots setup and what hardware is powering that setup. Please comment if you have a question.

List running processes

Kill a process

Determine open shares

Determine IP address

Get a new IP address

Remotely display machine’s MAC address

Remotely list running processes every second

Remotely display System Info

Disk drive information

Bios info

List all patches

Look for a particular patch

Remotely List Local Enabled Accounts

Start a service remotely

List services

Disable startup service

List user accounts

Enable RDP remotely

List number of times a user logged on

Query active RDP sessions

Remove active RDP session ID 2

Remotely query registry for last logged in user

List all computers in domain “blah”

Reboot

Shutdown

Remotely reboot machine

Copy entire folder and its contents from a remote source to local machine

Find location of file with string “blah” in file name

Spawn a new command prompt

Determine name of a machine with known IP

Find directory named blah

Command line history

Determine the current user (aka whoami Linux equivalent)

Determine who is apart of the administrators group

Add a user where travis is the username and password is blah

Add user travis to administrators group

List user accounts

Map a network share with a given drive letter of T:

List network connections and the programs that are making those connections

Display contents of file text.txt

Edit contents of file text.txt

Determine PC name

Run cmd.exe as administrator user

Uninstall a program, Symantec in this case ;-}

Determine whether a system is 32 or 64 bit

Powershell one liner download file

Information about OS version and other useful system information

Startup applications

Recursively unzip all zip folders, you’ll need unzip.exe for this

I often see that professional penetration testers will highlight an open windows share that can be read or written to by everyone. They will often highlight other shares that are accessible by a large group such as Authenticated users. I don’t want to scoff at these types of open shares as they should be investigated by the business owner that created the open shares. The main thing to consider is what information lies within those open shares. Open shares are usually created for a reason, so that users easily share information. This is not bad unless the information in those shares is secret / classified material. To check for this possible sensitive information one would have to search all the files and folders in that share. Now you can use the cute little dog search feature inside of windows explorer to look for this information but using that your hands are somewhat tied. The search feature inside windows explorer actually does a nice job but if you wanted to automate the process to look at multiple shares and search for multiple terms then you’re out of luck. Because of this I wanted to script something that would automate the process. Powershell could have been an option but because I’m already familiar with python I stuck to what I know. This means that in order to run the script you’ll have to have python installed on windows. I could have written the script to work in Linux but that would have meant using cifs to map drives which seemed like more of a headache then just using python on windows.

You’ll need to open up a windows command prompt to run the script and it’s a good idead to add Python to the windows path. So the script takes two arguments. The first argument is the file containing all the shares that you want to search. The second argument is the file that contains all the terms you want to search for. So to run the script you would issue a command similar to below, where searchShares.py is the name of the python script.

Your shares.txt file should look similar to below.

Your searchTerms.txt file should look similar to below.

In the example above the term “secret” will be recursively searched in all three shares. Then “password” will be recursively searched in all three shares, then so on and so on. The script will output any file, file name, or folder name that matches any of the search terms. Currently the script will read each file in binary format which means if it comes across a word document file (such as document.doc) it doesn’t open / read the file like microsoft word would. The current script reads each line of the binary file looking for your search term. Reading a text file as binary seems to work fine but reading in microsoft office documents as binary have different results. One thing I’ve noticed in my testing is that generally speaking it does just fine searching through a *.doc file but has trouble searching through a *.docx file. Binary searching is not ideal but it’s my current solution. Python has the capability to open microsoft office documents in a more native format but for my first go round I haven’t implemented that solution.

Once you run the script you will see output similar to below.

This output on the command prompt is to given as a verbose message so that you know what’s going on with the script. The output on the command prompt will not tell you if it found a search term. The results of your searching is placed in a text file called output.txt located in the current directory. The content of output.txt should look similar to the following.

So you can see that it matches the file name as well as the contents of the file. One thing to keep in mind is that this script can take a while to run. There two factors that control how fast it runs, 1) Speed of the network and 2) Size (GB, MB, etc) of the share. It works best when your network is local and not in another city. The biggest factor is going to be the size of the share. Running this script on a major file sahre that is say 800 GB in size will take a very long time. Keep in mind you can specify specific directories, so instead of searching in the root share such as \\share\one maybe it’s a better idea to searh in \\share\one\two\three. So keep these factors in mind when running the script. Below is the script, simply cut and paste into your text editor of choice and save as searchShares.py

import os

import sys

import re



output = open('output.txt', 'a')

output.write('\n')

fileList = []

shareList = open(sys.argv[1])

eachShare = shareList.readlines();

for shares in eachShare:

    path = shares.rstrip('\r\n')

    print '\nWalking directory ' + path + '\n'

    for root, subFolders, files in os.walk(path):

        #print 'Indexing ' + root + '\n'

        for file in files:

            fileList.append(os.path.join(root,file))

            print 'Found ' + root + file

keywords = open(sys.argv[2])

searchTerm = keywords.readlines();

output.write('=== Directories or file names matching search criteria ===\n')

for term in searchTerm:

    strip = term.rstrip('\r\n')

    if any(strip in s for s in fileList):

        matching = [s for s in fileList if strip in s]

        for item in matching:

            output.write('\n' + item)

output.write('\n\n=== Files matching search criteria ===\n\n')

for term in searchTerm:

    strip = term.strip('\r\n')

    for item in fileList:

        print 'Searching file ' + item + ' for term ' + term

        searchFile = open(item, 'rb')

        for line in searchFile:

            if re.search(strip, line, re.IGNORECASE):

                output.write('found ' + strip + ' in file ' + item + '\n')

                break

    searchFile.close()

output.close()

Let me know if this works / doesn’t work and also let me know if you have any suggestions on how to make it better. One thing I might do in the future is to limit the types of files it searches to say only .txt, .doc, .xls, etc. Happy hunting for information on shares.

There may need to be some clarification in that diagram. Backtrack is what is actually running honeyd, the address of 192.168.99.135 (labeled Honeyd) which is the honeypot honeyd created can be configured to emulate any operating system. Now for the honeyd config file.

So the only real difference between dhcp and a static IP is the last line of the config. If you go back to the first tutorial you’ll notice the last line is the only difference as well. As a side I’ve used some configs that do not have the MAC address defined in their config but when I did not include the “set windows ethernet” line honeyd would complain and not start. So after you’ve set your config simply start honeyd.

After running honeyd you should get similar output to below.

The difference in output between static and dynamic is that you’ll see the IP address your honeypot gets when using DHCP. With static IP configuration you’re not going to get that in your output because you already know the IP you’re using. So the output via DHCP will the lines below included.

So now you’ve take care of properly setting up honeyd to use a static IP address but now you’ll have to configure the network to use your static IP. In my enterprise production environment I’ve configured this via the DHCP server. I went into the DHCP server and made a static reservation. I also had to configure the switch I plugged my computer into and tell what VLAN that port needed to be assigned to. If you’re trying to get this set up in your work production environment you may have to work with your network team that manages DHCP / DNS / routers & switches. Networks may be managed differently so check with your local team on how you would get a static IP. Now if you’re doing this on a home network for testing then you probably have a wireless router such as Linksys. Inside all of these home wireless routers you can configure static IP’s. Each wireless router will have different steps for configuring static IP’s so refer to your manufacturers documentation on how to do that.

Next in this tutorial is what to run your honeypot / honeyd on? Laptop, desktop, server? These questions will be tackled in future articles.

The personality tries to emulate what device you are trying to pretend to be. There are plenty of other personalities we could choose from so when setting up multiple honeypots you may want to emulate other devices besides a standard Windows device. Maybe you’d like to emulate a Solaris box, PBX system, or if you are going to emulate a Windows device make it real juicy to an attacker by making it a Windows 98 device. You’ve got plenty of options when choosing a personality for your honeypot. Honeyd takes advantage of nmap and the way it fingerprints devices. The list of personalities is located in the nmap.prints file, you should be able to find this file by using the following command

You can view this file using less, for me I issued the following command.

Nmap has a version of this file as well named “nmap-os-db”. The nmap.prints and the nmap-os-db may or may not match up depending on your versions of nmap and honeyd. My nmap-os-db is in the following location.

Within nmap.prints anything that follows the word “Fingerprint” is available as a personality. As an example below the string “Avaya G3 PBX version 8.3″ can be used as a personality in honeyd.conf

In my example I will emulate this Avaya PBX device and I will also emulate a Soalris device. So a diagram of my setup looks like the following.

So now that I’ve decided to also emulate a Solaris and Avaya device I’ll need to add both of these do honeyd.conf. Basically all you’ll need to do is copy and paste from the Windows device you’ve already setup in honeyd.conf then make some minor modifications such as the personality. My honeyd.conf for all three of these honeypots is below.

After you’ve added this information to honeyd.conf go ahead and run honeyd with the options discussed in part one, you should see the following.

If everything has gone smooth up to this point you’ve gotten output similar to above. So currently we’ve got three honeypots running on one installation of honeyd. Now the proof is in the pudding by port scanning these devices and see if the ports are open and what OS nmap claims it to be. DHCP gave our Avaya device an IP address of 192.168.99.160, let’s port scan for the two open ports and a port we know to be closed and see what results we get.

Looks like everything is on the up and up with our Avaya device. Port 5555 is closed because we did not define it in honeyd.conf. I’ll spare you with the nmap scan of the Solaris device but everything was operating as normal for it as well. So the ports are open but how well is this personality thing working? Nmap can try and determine the OS of a device through a number of TCP exchanges. Honeyd tries to use the nmap fingerprint database to send the appropriate TCP responses to a nmap scan so that the personality you’ve assigned to your template will respond as it should. This doesn’t always work properly. New versions of nmap are constantly coming out which means the nmap fingerprint database is changing as well. So nmap may respond properly or it may not, this will just depend on the version of nmap you or an attacker is scanning with. It will also depend on the nmap.prints that honeyd uses as well. You can perform an OS detection in nmap by providing it the -O option, let’s try scanning our Solaris device and see what it returns.

Seeing how this might happen you don’t want to totally rely on the personality in honeyd. The best idea is to open up ports that are common to a particular device. For instance most Linux and Solaris devices have port 22 open while routers and switches will probably have port 161 open (SNMP). The configuration is totally up to you but trying to make your honeypot as sweet as possible is the main goal.

So adding multiple honeypots to your honeyd install is fairly straightforward but there are some things to consider when setting it up. Other topics such as email alerts are coming but for now make sure you can get multiple honeypots running via honyed.

For this tutorial I will be using one Windows machine and one Linux machine, Backtrack distribution to be exact. Backtrack will be the machine that is running honeyd. Honeyd is available for Windows but I highly recommend that you use honeyd on Linux. If you’re half way interested in information security then I suggest that you get to know Linux as there are a lot of information security tools such as honeyd that use Linux. Sorry for the Linux rant, below is basic diagram of my setup.

The idea here is that we’ll install and configure honeyd on Backtrack then simply test that we have connectivity with our Windows machine. To see if you have honeyd installed on Backtrack (or any Linux system) simply type “honey + TAB”, if “d” is shown right after honey then you know you have honeyd installed as it is an available command if you don’t have honeyd installed on Backtrack run the following command

This will also work for any Debian based Linux system. To install on other distributions such as Gentoo, Fedora, Slackware, etc I would check their documentation on how to install packages. After honeyd is installed the next thing we’ll need to do is create a configuration file. A honeyd configuration file is the heart of your honeypot. The configuration file tells honeyd what operating system to emulate, what ports to open, what services should be ran, etc. This config file can be tweaked to emulate all sorts setups but for right now let’s look at a simple setup and get that up and running. Below is my config file.

Within Backtrack you can use Kate or nano text editors to create this file. In Backtrack Kate is under the Utilities menu. The “create default” section simply tells honeyd to drop traffic unless it is defined later in the configuration file. I find this section is needed when you let your honeypot acquire an IP address via dhcp. Also it’s probably a good idea to implement this section so that you only answer to network connections that you define later in the config file. Anytime you see “create” within the config file you are creating a template for a honeypot, so you can create as many honeypots as you’d like within the honed.conf config. In the windows template we are defining a number of things. First we are setting the personality, meaning when another device on the network connects to this honeypot it will appear to be a Windows XP Pro SP1 device. This is emulated via network stack fingerprints. In the windows template I’m also opening up three ports (135, 139, and 445). These are common ports that are open on a windows system. The “action reset” statement will drop traffic if it is not aimed at the open ports defined in this config. The “set windows ethernet” sets a MAC address for our honeypot.  This will be needed if you run your honeypot via dhcp. You can simply make up any MAC address you’d like, I usually keep it close to the physical MAC address that I’m running the honeypot off of. Finally the dhcp statement tells the windows template to acquire an IP address from dhcp. Now that we have our honeyd.conf file properly setup it’s time to launch honeyd, below is the command I use when initially getting honeyd up and running.

Here we use the -d so that it doesn’t run in the background (or doesn’t run as a daemon in Linux terms). This allow for more verbose output so that we can troubleshoot as needed. Running in this mode will also show the IP that was given to our honeypot via dhcp. Below is the type of output you should see after running the honeyd command.

In this verbose output we see that dhcp gave our honeypot the address of 192.168.99.135. From our windows machine let’s ping that IP address and make sure that we have connectivity. You should see output on the terminal similar to below.

So congrats you’ve successfully deployed honeyd. We can now ping our honeypot but we need to make sure the ports we’ve configured to be open are open. Let’s us the cadillac of port scanners nmap to detect open ports on our honeypot. You can scan for all 65,535 ports on our honeypot but to keep the verbose output of honeyd low let’s just scan for a handful of ports. Below is the nmap command I used.

The output of this command should look similar to below.

So honeyd appears to be working correctly. If you’ve reached this point then you are on your way to doing even more with honeypots and honeyd. The main purpose of this article was to get you up and running. In the next series of articles we’ll configure more honeypots, set static IP’s, get alerts on devices port scanning our honeypots, investigate malware, etc. If you have any questions, catch errors, or have any feedback please comment below.

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Last logged on user

Searches within the windows OS

Applications launched from the “Start > Run” menu

Recent documents

Installed applications that reside in “Control Panel > Add/Remove programs”

Mounted devices

USB devices that have been attached

Applications that are ran during startup

List of windows services

Recent network settings, where GUID refers to the network interface

Wireless network information

Mapped network drives

Typed URL’s into the browser

Last time the computer was shut down (64bit value representing time)

Determine if last access times is enabled (0) or disabled (1)

Computer name

Determine if autoplay is disabled / enabled, link with more info below

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967715

List of files open or saved via windows explorer

List of drives mapped via the map network drive wizard

Devices or IP’s connected to

Mounted drives

List of files played in Windows Media Player

List of recently accessed WinZip files

List of Microsoft Office files that have been accessed

Browser helper objects (BHO’s), can be associated with malware but it’s been a while since I’ve seen this.

Entries in this location are automatically started when explorer.exe is ran

Can point to logon scripts

DLL’s in this location are loaded when a GUI app is launched

Programs to be run when user logs in