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.

Some time ago we started to redirect to SSH honeypots in the test mode the outer SSH port from Turrises of some volunteers from the development team. For the biggest number of attackers to “talk“ to us, we allowed in honeypot the login into root by random password; despite this most of bots will anyway do nothing and they will immediately disconnect themselves even after unsuccessful attempt.

In our Turris project, in addition to taking preventive measures that would protect users against various attacks from the outside, we also do other activities. Those include contacting clients from whose side we detect attempts to connect to IP addresses that are known to be botnets’ command and control centers, or blocking IP addresses that are used by websites to perform malicious attacks on users. During that time we have seen some curious incidents that I would like to briefly outline here.