Category Archives: HoneyPoint

Cyber Situational Awareness stories from the International Cyber Front…yes folks Asymmetric Cyber Conflict

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Red Dragon Rising bids you a great morning from Abu Dhabi & the Middle East Homeland Security Summit.

Here are some of the latest Cyber Situational Awareness stories from the International front you need to know…

Confidential report lists U.S. weapons system designs compromised by Chinese cyberspies

See the entire story @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/confidential-report-lists-us-weapons-system-designs-compromised-by-chinese-cyberspies/2013/05/27/a42c3e1c-c2dd-11e2-8c3b-0b5e9247e8ca_story.html

軍事行動古村 OP Middle Kingdom achieves objective of complete colonization of Australia…US scare tactics to keep Chinese business out

http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/us-scare-tactics-to-keep-chinese-business-out-20130527-2n7lb.html

Premier Li : People’s Republic of China, Germany now economic ‘dream team’ OP Middle Kingdom continues…Colonization of Europe continues under OP Middle Kingdom…Germany acknowledges People’s Republic of China as the True Global Leader…

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/27/us-china-germany-li-idUSBRE94Q0JZ20130527

OP Middle Kingdom (軍事行動古村) captures United Kingdom as the People’s Republic of China continues affirmative colonization of the United Kingdom…UK and Germany ‘oppose duties on People’s Republic of China duties’

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22684663

Tracing APT_163QQ Malware from the People’s Republic of China…Hong Kong

http://espionageware.blogspot.hk/

People’s Republic of China’s PLA: Electronic warfare unit in simulated offense-and-defense drill – People’s Daily Online

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90786/8253243.html

As Chinese Leader’s Visit Nears, United States Will Be Urged to Allow Retaliation Against Cyberattacks

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/world/asia/as-chinese-leaders-visit-nears-us-urged-to-allow-retaliation-for-cyberattacks.html?

Iranian Hackers targeting US oil, gas, and electric companies

http://thehackernews.com/2013/05/iranian-hackers-targeting-us-oil-gas.html

The U.S.-China Showdown Over Cyber Attacks Heats Up

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-24/the-u-dot-s-dot-china-showdown-over-cyberhacking-heats-up

Strike Back If People’s Republic of China Steals IP, Companies Told —

http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/strike-back-if-china-steals-ip-companies/240155480

People’s Republic of China’s Coexistence Strategy and the Consequences for World Order

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=40914&cHash=d8be948bc55dcb0d41788b4b876db5c6

Missile Defense with Chinese Characteristics

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=40915&cHash=bd1dd683123a93c0ab390143b34d7a90

People’s Republic of China: Informatization Drives Expanded Scope of Public Security

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=40721&cHash=f1a040999f18d83c1c56713807fc5e6f

A naval fleet of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on Monday passed through the Miyako Strait and entered the Western Pacific Ocean for a training mission

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013-05/27/content_16537520.htm

Seriously? USA to legalize rootkits, spyware, ransomware and trojans to combat piracy?

http://blog.emsisoft.com/2013/05/27/seriously-usa-to-legalize-rootkits-spyware-ransomware-and-trojans-to-combat-piracy/

People’s Republic of China to Build $5 Billion EU Beachhead in Belarus

China to Build $5 Billion EU Beachhead in Belarus

軍事行動古村 OP Middle Kingdom…How do you spell ‘COLONIZATION’ by the People’s Republic of China “E U”
EU countries resist plan to impose duties on Chinese solar panels…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/27/eu-duties-chinese-solar-panels

Next Target of COLONIZATION by the People’s Republic of China…Switzerland….軍事行動古村 OP Middle Kingdom…
People’s Republic of China calls time on import tariffs on Swiss watches

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/27/china-calls-time-import-tariffs-swiss-watches

People’s Republic of China’s OP Middle Kingdom 軍事行動古村: Greece becomes trade battleground as China invests in NCI
The Chinese are interested in airports, harbours and railways…” Chinese colonization continues unabated…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/27/greece-trade-battleground-foreign-investors-swoop

Semper Fi,

謝謝

紅龍

Cyber News Today from Homeland Security Middle East – Abu Dhabi, UAE

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Happy Memorial Day Readers;

The Red Dragon and MicroSolved are at the Homeland Security Summit- Middle East taking place in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates…

Latest World Cyber News you should be maintaining cyber situational awareness on comes to you today after 6 different flights across 4 different continents and a total of 30,000 airmiles…oh yes 5 hours of sleep –

Nonetheless – here are some developing stories out of the International Cyber World….

General Alexander – Four-star general in eye of U.S. cyber storm… Read more @ http://newsle.com/article/0/76523525/

The covert battle over Beijing’s defence policy heats up…People’s Republic of China gets into the business of making friends

Read more @ http://www.smh.com.au/world/china-gets-into-the-business-of-making-friends-20130524-2k6q3.html#ixzz2UTeO2Fht

People’s Republic of China’s Huawei a victim of its success

Read more @: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2013-05/25/content_16530834.htm &
http://wanderingchina.org/2013/05/26/huawei-a-victim-of-its-success-china-daily-risingchina-trade/

All for now from the Middle East…more to come as the world wakes to a new day…

Semper Fi,

謝謝

紅龍

64 Bit OS Reminder for HoneyPoint

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Just a quick note to help folks who are using HoneyPoint, regardless of version. If you are having trouble with execution on a 64 bit operating system, remember that HoneyPoint binaries are 32 bit. To run them on 64 bit OS’s, you need ensure that you have the 32 bit compatibility tools installed.

For Windows, read this.

For Ubuntu, read this.

For other operating systems, please consult your operating system vendors’ documentation. If we can be of any assistance, please contact your HoneyPoint support person.

Thanks!

HoneyPoint Security Server ICS/SCADA Deployment Example

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Recently, there have been several questions about potential deployment scenarios for HoneyPoint Security Server in and around ICS and SCADA organizations. Here is a quick, high level view of what a sample deployment might look like in a utility or other ICS environment. Note that the sample environment has fully embraced enclaveing. The network is fully segmented based on function.

In organizations where segmentation or the use of enclaves has not been established, HPSS can still be used and would be deployed in much the same manner.

Please let us know if you have any questions about this diagram or about deploying HPSS in your environment. We would be happy to set up a free consultation with you to discuss how the tool could aid in your detection program and give you increased visibility throughout your enterprise.

PS – If the graphic is difficult to read, right click on it and select view in new tab. The theme for the site is having trouble with this particular graphic.

HighLevelEnclaves

What is HPSS? :: HoneyPoint Agent

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This post builds on the What is HPSS? Series. Previous posts are here and here. 


HoneyPoint Agent is the original detection capability of the HoneyPoint Security Server suite. Basically, it allows a system to offer up a variety of “fake services” to the network for the purpose of detection. These services can either be simple port listeners or can be complex, deeper emulations of protocols like SMTP, HTTP, Telnet, FTP, etc. These ports have no real users and no legitimate traffic flows to them. This means that anytime these ports are tampered with, the interactions are “suspicious at best and malicious at worst”. 


HPAgentOverview

Because the Agent is designed to be extremely light weight in terms of computing power needed, the Agents can be sprinkled throughout the network environment easily. Many organizations simply add Agent into default server and workstation builds, turning most of the systems in their network into sensors for detection. 

 

Other organizations deploy Agent more sporadically, either using virtual or physical appliances dedicated to HoneyPoint hosting. These organizations often assign multiple physical or virtual interfaces to the devices, allowing them to have a presence on many network segments at the same time.

 

Still other users leverage an approach called “scattersensing” by deploying HoneyPoint on systems that they move periodically around their environment. This makes for a less dependable detection mechanism, but gives them the capability to get more vision into “hotspots” where targeting is expected or where malware is more likely to pop-up. 

 

The most successful HoneyPoint Agent deployments use a combination of these tactics, along with including strategies like DNS redirection of known command and control sites and other more active forms of getting bad traffic into the HoneyPoint systems.

 

HoneyPoint Agent has proven to be very useful in identifying scanning and malware outbreaks. Customers with supposedly secure networks have found malware that had been missed for years by their traditional internal security tools. These were detected when the ongoing slow and low scanning triggered HoneyPoint deployments, particularly for SQL, Terminal Server and other commonly targeted ports.

 

HoneyPoint Agent can be configured through the command line or via a GUI application, making it easy to manage and deploy. Once installed, it is a “deploy and forget” style tool which doesn’t require ongoing tuning or signature updates. Generally speaking, customers deploy Agent and it runs for years without feeding and care.

 

HoneyPoint Agent also features MSI’s patented “defensive fuzzing” capabilities (previously known as HornetPoint mode), which can create self-defending services that attempt to take down attacker tools during their probing to interfere with propagation. Still other users automate defense with Agent using it as a means for black holing hosts that probe their environment. In these optional, more active roles, Agent can help organizations strengthen their posture with a “one strike and you’re out” kind of approach. 

 

HoneyPoint Agent runs in Linux, Windows and OS X. It communicates securely with the HoneyPoint Console. It also features user configurable services, a known scanning host ignore list (for ongoing vulnerability assessment clients) and a wide variety of common service emulation templates (available through support). 

 

To learn more about HoneyPoint Security Server or to get a demo, please contact us. We would be happy to walk you through the product and discuss how it might fit into your environment. There is even a free for personal use “Community Edition” available to get you started or to let you experience the power, ease and flexibility of the platform yourself. Just give us a call to learn more about HoneyPoint Security Server and HoneyPoint Agent. You’ll be glad you did! 


Reminder: Upgrade HoneyPoint Console to 3.52

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Just a quick reminder to all HoneyPoint Security Server users that Console 3.52 is now available on the distribution site. Access information for the distribution site is in the Quick Start Guide that you received when you first downloaded the product.

This new version of the Console component includes speed improvements, bug fixes and .DLL upgrades of some of the underlying modules.

Contact your account executive or technical support if you would like more information.

Gameframe Follow Up

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This is a follow up to the original Gameframe scan post here. (**Note I have defanged the urls, edit them manually if you copy and paste)

Throughout the end of December, we saw just a few more probes in the public HITME that contained the Gameframe pattern. The ports shifted between port 80 and port 3128. The initial bursts of probes we observed were on port 3131, but they seem to now be occurring across the port spectrum.

The only host the public HITME caught these probes from was: 96.254.171.2 – WHOIS – US, Verizon

A Twitter user, (@benediktkr), also pointed out probes on port 8080 from a small batch of source IPs. He also observed the same source IP, which means the scanning is likely pretty wide, given that we have seen it from several of the HITME end points. 

Here is a quick dump of the log for the few we saw at the end of December (Output from a HoneyPoint plugin): 

2012-12-19 08:12:57|96.254.171.2|80|GET hxxp://gameframe.net/headers HTTP/1.1\nUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.28) Gecko/20120306 Firefox/3.6.28 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)\nHost: gameframe.net\nAccept-Encoding: deflate, gzip\nProxy-Connection: Keep-Alive\nAccept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5\nAccept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\nAccept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\nPragma: no-cache\nCache-Control: no-cache\n\n
2012-12-19 12:30:38|96.254.171.2|3128|GET hxxp://gameframe.net/headers HTTP/1.1\nUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.28) Gecko/20120306 Firefox/3.6.28 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)\nHost: gameframe.net\nAccept-Encoding: deflate, gzip\nProxy-Connection: Keep-Alive\nAccept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5\nAccept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\nAccept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\nPragma: no-cache\nCache-Control: no-cache\n\n
2012-12-28 12:46:42|96.254.171.2|3128GET hxxp://gameframe.net/headers HTTP/1.1\nUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.28) Gecko/20120306 Firefox/3.6.28 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)\nHost: gameframe.net\nAccept-Encoding: deflate, gzip\nProxy-Connection: Keep-Alive\nAccept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5\nAccept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\nAccept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\nPragma: no-cache\nCache-Control: no-cache\n\n

We also picked up this probe, which is quite different from the others, which is interesting in general, note that the source host is also different – this time from 92.240.68.153 – WHOIS – Latvia

2012-12-27 10:29:27|92.240.68.153|80|GET hxxp://thumbs.ifood.tv/files/Salmonella_in_Vegetables.jpg HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: webcollage/1.135a Host: thumbs.ifood.tv headers HTTP/1.1\nUser-Agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.10\nHost: gameframe.net\nAccept-Encoding: deflate, gzip\nProxy-Connection: Keep-Alive\nAccept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5\nAccept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\nAccept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\nPragma: no-cache\nCache-Control: no-cache\n\n

It is likely that others are simply using the headers output of this page for other types of probes and scans, likely to identify open proxies and alternate paths to avoid censorship or to use in proxy chains to help hide their origins for other purposes.

If you run a black list of IPs as a part of your defense, or redirect bad IPs to a HoneyPoint, you should likely add these two sources to the list if you aren’t using the automated approach.

We will continue to observe these probes and let you know what else we see. Thanks for reading.

From the HITME: Port 3131 “Gameframe” Scans

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We’ve been watching some interesting scans primarily hitting our HITME sensors in Asia for the last couple of weeks. The connection occurs on port 3131/TCP and contains the following request:

GET http://gameframe.net/headers HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.10
Host: gameframe.net
Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

The scans we have seen seem to be originating primarily from Europe.

Have you seen similar scans and probes on this port? If so, please share with us in comments or via Twitter (@lbhuston). 

In the meantime, it is worth checking your application logs if you have any custom applications deployed on this port, particularly exposed to the Internet. While we don’t see anything indicating an attack, review of anything exposed for errors or follow on attack traffic is suggested (it’s usually a good idea anyway). 

Thanks for reading! 

 

What is HPSS? :: The Console

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This article builds on the What is HPSS? Series. The original overview article is here. 

The HoneyPoint Security Server Console is the “brain” of the HoneyPoint product platform. It is the central component responsible for getting alert data from the sensors, tracking and maintaining the alert data, presenting it to the user and safely passing the essential alert data on to the automated plugins or other systems in the security event chain.


HoneyPointConsoleRole

The Console is a GUI application that includes a built-in database engine for tracking Alert Data state and to empower reporting and analysis over time. Alert Data from the sensors are sent to the Console over TCP and the data is encrypted. The Console application runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. 

 

Once the Console receives Alert Data from the sensors, it parses it to validate that the data is good and checks to see what actions it should take based on the alerting configuration, assigned admins list, ignored hosts lists, and other trust rules in place. 

It then presents the alert data to the appropriate mechanisms, alerting users, passing the desired elements of the alert data to syslog/event log on the Console system for upstream processing by SEIMs or other event tools. The Console also passes certain event data as determined by the configuration into the “plugins mechanism”. 

 

The plugins then execute the desired operations on the data, easily allowing the security team to further extend reporting to custom event handlers or perform automated responses. This flexible solution empowers the security team to integrate HoneyPoint Security Server fully into whatever technology platform/response process they desire or have in place.

 

Reporting from the Console is very simple. The included reporting engine can create a wide variety of canned reports in either CSV or HTML format, ensuing that the data in the HoneyPoint system is easy to use. Additionally, other reporting tools like Crystal Reports or the like, or even languages like PERL, Python or Ruby, can easily attach to the Console database to create whatever types of custom reports you desire.

 

All in all, HoneyPoint Security Server was designed to make it easy to use and yet flexible enough for the most demanding and mature infosec teams. The console interface is friendly, functional and easily understandable. Most teams require less than a 30 minute walk through before they are off and running with the basic detection power HoneyPoint provides. When they get comfortable with the system, they quickly master the plugins meta-language and are soon automating large groups of detection and response tasks.

 

To learn more about HoneyPoint Security Server or to get a demo, please contact us. We would be happy to walk you through the product and discuss how it might fit into your environment. There is even a free for personal use “Community Edition” available to get you started or to let you experience the power, ease and flexibility of the platform yourself. Just give us a call to learn more about HoneyPoint Security Server Console. You’ll be glad you did!