Information security communities are always talking about ”attackers” or “blackhats”, but in reality very little is known about their skills. The idea of studying attacker behaviors was pioneered in the early nineties. In the last decade the number of attacks has increased exponentially and honeypots were introduced in order to gather information about attackers and to develop early-warning sys...

Honeypots are network surveillance architectures designed to resemble easy-to-compromise computer systems. They are deployed with the aim to trap hackers in order to help security professionals capture, control, and analyze malicious Internet attacks and other activities of hackers. A botnet is an army of compromised computers controlled by a bot herder and used for illicit financial gain. Botn...

Honeypots are more and more used to collect data on malicious activities on the Internet and to better understand the strategies and techniques used by attackers to compromise target systems. Analysis and modeling methodologies are needed to support the characterization of attack processes based on the data collected from the honeypots. This paper presents some empirical analyses based on the d...

We analyze the increasing threats against IoT devices. We show that Telnet-based attacks that target IoT devices have rocketed since 2014. Based on this observation, we propose an IoT honeypot and sandbox, which attracts and analyzes Telnet-based attacks against various IoT devices running on different CPU architectures such as ARM, MIPS, and PPC. By analyzing the observation results of our hon...

This research in progress paper explores the use of Graphviz and Afterglow for the analysis of data emanating from a honeypot system. Honeypot systems gather a wide range of data that is often difficult to readily search for patterns and trends using conventional log file analysis techniques. The data from the honeypots has been statically extracted and processed through Afterglow scripts to pr...

Attack detection in high-speed networks is a hot research topic. While the performance of packet oriented signature-based approaches is questionable, flow-based anomaly detection shows high false positive rates. We tried to combine both techniques. In this paper, we study the applicability of flow-based attack detection. We installed a lab environment consisting of a monitoring infrastructure a...

The increased utilization of the Internet and the larger number of computers connected to it has brought up a significant security problem. Hackers or crackers have attacked computers and need to be detected and neutralized. This study presents a brief description of tools and methods of the honeypot community. A new tool resulting from a shift on the focus of the research allows system adminis...

Neural projection techniques can adaptively map high-dimensional data into a low-dimensional space, for the user-friendly visualization of data collected by different security tools. Such techniques are applied in this study for the visual inspection of honeypot data, which may be seen as a complementary network security tool that sheds light on internal data structures through visual inspectio...