A couple of weeks ago, I got an email informing me that it had been almost three years since my entry into the Turris project, and I could now purchase the router for a symbolic price of one crown. I did that right away to test for my colleagues whether the system works well; however, it also brought back nostalgic memories. Because three years ago I had the same goal – to test whether everything was working properly – when I filled what was probably the first router lease contract. Those three years have gone by in a flash, so it is perhaps a good time to stop and look back.
Telnet is not dead – at least not on ‘smart’ devices
Depending on your age, you either might or might not have used Telnet to connect to remote computers in the past. But regardless of your age, you would probably not consider Telnet for anything you currently use. SSH has become the de facto standard when it comes to remote shell connection as it offers higher security, data encryption and much more besides.
Turris Omnia campaign enters a new phase
It is hard to believe, but it is almost half a year since the Omnia campaign started on Indiegogo. In that time, much has changed. Most importantly, we now know that there is a place on the market for a high-end open-source router – we have one million US dollars to prove it :).
Turris Omnia crowdfunding campaign in figures and images
A crowdfunding campaign for the Turris Omnia router on the portal Indiegogo.com ended after two months collecting 858 thousand dollars, which exceeded the original goal more than eight times. In this post, we’ll look closer at the progress of the campaign with the help of charts and tables.
How we let a router get “cracked”
In the previous two blog posts about project Turris, we described how a telnet “minipot” helped us to uncover a possible botnet consisting mainly of home routers from ASUS (1, 2). In this article, we will describe one possible way how these devices might have been compromised.
More about the honeypot for Telnet and botnets
Three weeks ago we published preliminary results of data analysis of the honeypot for the Telnet protocol, which we have launched in test mode. Today we will look at the situation change after we installed the tool on all the Turris routers.
Botnet from compromised routers
In the next release of Turris OS, we would like to give our users the possibility to play a more active part in detection of network attacks. The first of the new functions is SSH honeypot which lures the attacker into a virtual environment where we can then observe his activity. This method will be more thoroughly described in a separate blog post planned for the near future. The second addition is less ambitious, but much simpler and still very useful. It is stripped down version of a honeypot which we internally call a “minipot”. In contrast to the normal honeypot which lets any attacker in with any password, our minipot just pretends that there is the possibility of logging in, and collects the supplied user names and passwords.