Three years with Turris

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.

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.