Tag Archives: HoneyPoint

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! 


What is this HoneyPoint Thing Anyway?

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Launched in 2006, initially as a distributed honey pot product, HoneyPoint Security Server (HPSS) has grown well beyond the initial concept. Today HPSS is a platform of components woven into a tightly integrated, fully capable, extremely flexible threat detection product. Organizations around the world are using it as a means of early detection of internal and external attackers, malware outbreaks and signs of users poking around where they shouldn’t be. Mature organizations have leveraged the product as a means of deterring attacks through automated black holing of scanning hosts on their perimeter, embedded detective controls inside their web applications to cut off users violating their terms of service and gather real world threat metrics to feed back into their mature risk management initiatives.

 

In the world of ICS/SCADA, HoneyPoint has found a quickly growing set of fans. HPSS can be deployed in a completely passive way that has no chance of interfering with critical operations, yet still brings incredible detection capability and vision into even the most sensitive of networks. ICS/SCADA environments have traditionally embraced the honeypot ideal, coining the term “canary” for these tools, but never before have they had such an easy to use, distributable, centrally monitored honeypot capability like HoneyPoint brings to the table.

 

Over the next few months, we will be deep diving into each of the HPSS components, but for now, as a high-level overview, here is a quick and dirty explanation of each of them:

 

  • HPSS Console – This is the central “brain” of the product. Designed as an easy to use GUI application, it receives the alerts detected by the sensor components and presents them to the user for analysis. It includes the “plugin” capability which allows for additional reporting and security automation based on the event data detected. The Console provides for “point and click” easy integration with SEIM products for clients who have deeper back-end data aggregation systems in place.
  • HoneyPoint Agent – This is the original HoneyPoint detection capability. Agent creates “fake services” on the network that have no real use other than detection. Since the services aren’t real, any interaction with them is “suspicious at best and malicious at worst”. Agent is capable of emulating a great variety of services and is completely user configurable. Agent runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. 
  • Wasp – Wasp is HoneyPoint’s hybrid client for Windows systems. It offers many of the port dilation features of Agent, but layers on top of that a whitelisting detection mechanism, file change detection for key files and some simple heuristics to identify the most common signs of intrusion. Tiny footprint, immense flexibility, self tuning whitelisting and no interference with operations make it an excellent choice for critical infrastructure use.
  • HoneyPoint Web – This is a completely emulated web environment with a mock up of applications that the organization uses. The entire environment is “fake” and studded with detection mechanisms that capture and measure attacker behavior, intent and capability. It might seem to be a new version of a banking application “accidentally” exposed to the Internet, or a replica of an HMI or maybe a login portal for Sharepoint/VPN or some other mechanism. What it really is is a detection mechanism for the good guys. Completely customized, able to detect the difference between a human attacker and most malware, it offers organizations a deeper, sneakier way to detect illicit behavior and measure the attacker attention various attack surfaces receive.
  • HoneyElements – Embeddable HTML and Javascript objects that can be added to new or existing real web applications, these HoneyPoints extend detection into the layers of the application itself. Integrates well with automated response and attacker black holing defenses to stop attackers and those engaging in undesired behaviors in real time.
  • HoneyBees – These work with Agent to simulate users authenticating to emulated services with plain text credentials. Organizations use this combination of tools to detect sniffing attacks and other attempts to harvest credentials off the wire or from network monitoring systems. 
  • HoneyPoint Trojans – Trojans are “fake” documents, applications or archives that appear to be real, but are actually detection mechanisms. For example, they might appear to be a PDF of some acquisition plans, while in reality they are armed with code to alert the security team when they have been opened or tampered with. Trojans use many of the same tactics as attackers, but instead of infection as a goal, they provide for detection and alerting.
  • HoneyPoint Handler – The Handler is a mechanism for getting external events into the HoneyPoint data ecosystem. Organizations often use the handler to receive events generated by custom nuance detection scripts. For example, a script might routinely check for new files in a directory or new files that contain the call base64decode(). When the script identifies a new file, the script can send an alert to the Handler, which will create a standard HoneyPoint alert from the script’s data and send it to the Console for easy and standardized security event management.
  • HoneyPoint Decoy Appliances – This is a set of hardened Linux powered devices that serve as an appliance for other components, usually Agent and Web. The appliances are available in three physical form factors (a rack mountable server, a mini-desktop, and a field deployable power substation solid state system) and/or a set of virtual appliances for most common virtualization platforms.
  • HoneyPoint Proxy – Lastly, this component is designed to act as an alerting data aggregator to simplify firewall ACLs that might be deployed between DMZ segments, enclaves or other network segments. The proxy can receive events from HoneyPoints and send them on to the Console without the need to expose the Console to each individual HoneyPoint. This makes managing global and highly distributed deployments significantly easier.

 

To learn more about these components and how they can be leveraged to give your organization new, flexible and deep detection capabilities, give us a call. Our engineers would be glad to discuss the technical capabilities and an account executive would be happy to work with you to create a HoneyPoint deployment that meets your needs AND your budget. At MicroSolved, we are passionate about information security and HoneyPoint Security Server is just another that way it shows!

HoneyPoint HoneyBees Help Catch Sniffers

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HoneyPoint has a component called a HoneyBee that can help organizations detect sniffing on their networks. The tool works like this:

  • HoneyBees are configured to talk to HoneyPoint Agents with a set of known credentials for an Agent emulated service
  • HoneyPoint Agent knows where the HoneyBees will be connecting from and those hosts are added to the local ignore list for that Agent
  • HoneyBees randomly create emulated “conversations” with HoneyPoint Agent in plain text, transmitting their credentials across the network for sniffers to pick up
  • The attacker or sniffing malware grabs the credentials through their sniffed traffic
  • The attacker or malware attempts to use those same credentials to authenticate to the HoneyPoint Agent
  • HoneyPoint Agent flags the authentication attempt as tampered traffic and alerts the security team to take action

By properly configuring the setup, this approach makes for a very effective tool to catch sniffing malware and attackers. Backing the credentials up with other detection mechanisms, such as in web applications and on AD forests can extend the approach even further. Our team has helped organizations stand up these kinds of nuance detection schemes across a variety of platforms. 

Even though the approach seems quite simple, it has proven to be quite adept at catching a variety of attacks. Customers continue to tell us that HoneyBees working with HoneyPoint Agent have been key indicators of compromise that have led them to otherwise undetected compromises.

HoneyBees are just another example of some of the ways that people are using the incredible flexibility of HoneyPoint to do nuance detection more easily than ever before. Gaining vision where they never had it has paid off, and HoneyPoints ability to turn vision into intelligence has proven itself over and over again.

To discuss HoneyPoint, HoneyBees or other forms of nuance detection, get in touch with MicroSolved. We would be happy to discuss how we can help your organization get more vision all around your enterprise.

Exposed Terminal Services Remains High Frequency Threat

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Quickly reviewing the HITME data gathered from our global deployment of HoneyPoint continues to show that exposed Terminal Services (RDP) on port 3389 remains a high frequency threat. In terms of general contact with the attack surface of an exposed Terminal Server connection, direct probes and attacker interaction is seen on an average approximately two times per hour. Given that metric, an organization who is using exposed Terminal Services for remote access or management/support, may be experiencing upwards of 48 attacks per day against their exposed remote access tool. In many cases, when we conduct penetration testing of organizations using Terminal Services in this manner, remote compromise of that service is found to lead to high levels of access to the organization’s data, if not complete control of their systems.

Many organizations continue to use Terminal Services without tokens or VPN technologies in play. These organizations are usually solely dependent on the security of login/password combinations (which history shows to be a critical mistake) and the overall security of the Terminal Services code (which despite a few critical issues, has a pretty fair record given its wide usage and intense scrutiny over the last decade). Clearly, deploying remote access and remote management tools is greatly preferred behind VPN implementations or other forms of access control. Additionally, upping Terminal Services authentication controls by requiring tokens or certificates is also highly suggested. Removing port 3389 exposures to the Internet will go a long way to increasing the security of organizations dependent on RDP technology.

If you would like to discuss the metrics around port 3389 attacks in more detail, drop us a line or reach out on Twitter (@microsolved). You can also see some real time metrics gathered from the HITME by following @honeypoint on Twitter. You’ll see lots of 3389 scan and probe sources in the data stream.

Thanks for reading and until next time, stay safe out there!

Audio Blog Post: Defensive Fuzzing and MSI’s Patent

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What goes into getting a patent? The answer would be: a lot of work! Brent Huston, CEO and Founder of MicroSolved, Inc., talks with Chris Lay, Account Executive, about MSI’s first patent for HoneyPoint’s defensive fuzzing capability. In this audio blog post, you’ll learn:

  • What is the patent about?
  • What is defensive fuzzing?
  • What went into the patent process?

Grab a drink and take a listen. As always, let us know what you think!

Click here to listen.

And don’t forget, you can follow Brent Huston on Twitter at @lbhuston and Chris Lay at @getinfosechere!

MicroSolved, Inc. Receives U.S. Patent For HoneyPoint Defensive Fuzzing InfoSec Tool

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MicroSolved, Inc. is pleased to announce that they have received a U.S. Patent (8,196,204 B2) on June 5, 2012, on technology components of their product HoneyPoint Security Server. This technology, known as “defensive fuzzing,” and the improvement mechanisms associated with it are a core component of creating self-defending implementations with HoneyPoint. 

The defensive fuzzing mechanism allows a computer network’s HoneyPoints to listen for an incoming connection from an attacker, and then disrupt that connection by tampering with the expected responses — in essence “fuzzing” the conversation. In many cases, this can confuse or crash the attacker’s tools or malware, limiting their capability to perform further attacks or damage.

The patent also covers a quality improvement technique for HoneyPoint technology. As the defensive fuzzing occurs, HoneyPoint tracks how successful it was with a given fuzzing technique. It has the ability to share that knowledge among various HoneyPoints so that as the system gets better with defensive fuzzing, the entire distributed system gets better at protecting the user’s environment.

This feature of MSI’s HoneyPoint detection system takes a passive defense and turns it into an active defense that can protect itself without human intervention.

“At MSI, we are truly committed to helping organizations protect their information assets, and we see this patent on defensive fuzzing as the next logical extension in helping organizations achieve high levels of protection with lower levels of resource requirements,” said Brent Huston, CEO and Founder of MicroSolved, Inc. “We are truly dedicated to extending even further in the future, the capability for organizations to defend their intellectual property.”

For more information about HoneyPoint, please visit our HoneyPoint webpage. To learn more about MicroSolved, Inc., visit wwww.microsolved.com.

 

How Honeypots Can Help Safeguard Your Information Systems

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A honeypot is a trap set to detect or deflect attempts at unauthorized use of information systems. Generally it consists of a computer, data or a network site that appears to be part of a network but which is actually isolated and protected, and which seems to contain information that would be of value to attackers.

It is important to note that honeypots are not a solution in themselves. They are a tool. How much they can help you depends upon what you are trying to achieve.

There are two different types of honeypots: production and research. Production honeypots are typically used by companies and corporations. They’re easy to use and capture only limited information.

Research honeypots are more complex. They capture extensive information, and used primarily by research, military, or government organizations.

The purpose of a production honeypot is to mitigate risk to an organization. It’s part of the larger security strategy to detect threats. The purpose of a research honeypot is to collect data on the blackhat community. They are used to gather the general threats against an organization, enabling the organization to strategize their response and protect their data.

The value of honeypots lies in their simplicity. It’s technology that is intended to be compromised. There is little or no production traffic going to or from the device. This means that any time a connection is sent to the honeypot, it is most likely to be a probe, scan, or even attack. Any time a connection is initiated from the honeypot, this most likely means the honeypot was compromised. As we say about our HoneyPoint Security Server, any traffic going to or from the honeypot is, by definition, suspicious at best, malicious at worst. Now, this is not always the case. Mistakes do happen, such as an incorrect DNS entry or someone from accounting inputting the wrong IP address. But in general, most honeypot traffic represents unauthorized activity. What are the advantages to using honeypots?

  1. Honeypots collect very little data. What they do collect is normally of high value. This eliminates the noise, making it much easier to collect and archive data. One of the greatest problems in security is sifting through gigabytes of useless data to find something meaningful. Honeypots can give users the exact information they need in a quick and easy to understand format.
     
  2. Many security tools can drown in bandwidth usage or activity. NIDs (Network Intrusion Detection devices) may not be able to handle network activity, and important data can fall through the cracks. Centralized log servers may not be able to collect all the system logs, potentially dropping logs. The beauty of honeypots is that they only capture that which comes to them.

Many of our clients swear by our HoneyPoint family of products to help save resources. With its advantages, it’s easy to see why! Leveraging the power of honeypots is an excellent way to safeguard your data.

 

How HoneyPoint Security Server Minimizes Risk For Your Network

If you’re looking for a security tool that goes beyond NIDS, you’re in luck.

MicroSolved’s HoneyPoint Security Server has revolutionized the ease and power of what honeypots can do and be. With the emergence of HoneyPoint Wasp, you can also apply the HoneyPoint magic to your Windows desktops. 

HoneyPoint Wasp monitors your desktops for any new applications it has not seen before (Anomaly Detection). Should Wasp detect new code, the end-user will never see a pop-up alert. Instead, you will be notified and able to quickly take action. Should the notification go without follow-up action, HoneyPoint Wasp assumes the allowed application, and no future notification will be sent to the console (Self-Tuning White Listing).

As you’ll see in a moment, the HoneyPoint Security Server is much more than a mere intrusion detection system.. It’s an underlying framework of rock-solid code that’s been built to achieve three important goals: identify real threats, isolate and tamper with the attacker’s results, and “smart” detection processes that allow you to target attacker availability.

Let’s take a look at each of these goals, and why they matter to what you’re doing online…

Click to continue…

HoneyPoint Internet Threat Monitoring Environment: An Easy Way to Pinpoint Known Attacker IPs

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One of the least understood parts of MicroSolved is how the HoneyPoint Internet Threat Monitoring Environment (#HITME) data is used to better protect our customers.

If you don’t know about the #HITME, it is a set of deployed HoneyPoints that gather real world, real time attacker data from around the Internet. The sensors gather attack sources, frequency, targeting information, vulnerability patterns, exploits, malware and other crucial event data for the technical team at MSI to analyze. You can even follow the real time updates of attacker IPs and target ports on Twitter by following @honeypoint or the #HITME hash tag. MSI licenses the data under Creative Commons, non-commercial and FREE as a public service to the security community.

That said, how does the #HITME help MSI better protect their customers? First, it allows folks to use the #HITME feed of known attacker IPs in a blacklist to block known scanners at their borders. This prevents the scanning tools and malware probes from ever reaching you to start with.

Next, the data from the #HITME is analyzed daily and the newest, bleeding edge attack signatures get added to the MSI assessment platform. That means that customers with ongoing assessments and vulnerability management services from MSI get continually tested against the most current forms of attack being used on the Internet. The #HITME data also gets updated into the MSI pen-testing and risk assessment methodologies, focusing our testing on real world attack patterns much more than vendors who rely on typical scanning tools and backdated threats from their last “yearly bootcamp”.

The #HITME data even flows back to the software vendors through a variety of means. MSI shares new attacks and possible vulnerabilities with the vendors, plus, open source projects targeted by attackers. Often MSI teaches those developers about the vulnerability, the possibilities for mitigation, and how to perform secure coding techniques like proper input validation. The data from the #HITME is used to provide the attack metrics and pattern information that MSI presents in its public speaking, the blog, and other educational efforts. Lastly, but certainly not least, MSI provides an ongoing alerting function for organizations whose machines are compromised. MSI contacts critical infrastructure organizations whose machines turn up in the #HITME data and works with them to mitigate the compromise and manage the threat. These data-centric services are provided, pro- bono, in 99% of all of the cases!

If your organization would be interested in donating an Internet facing system to the #HITME project to further these goals, please contact us. Our hope is that the next time you hear about the #HITME, you’ll get a smile on your face knowing that the members of our team are working hard day and night to protect MSI customers and the world at large. You can count on us, we’ve got your back!

MSI Strategy & Tactics Talk Ep. 26: Hacking Back or Strikeback Technologies

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Hacking back or strikeback technologies is a system  engineering term that could occur in a situation with a positive loop, whereby each component responds with an increased reaction to the response of the other component, and so the problem gets worse and worse. (The Information Security Dictionary: Defining the Terms That Define Security, by Urs E. Gattiker) Recently, a honey pot was created with some strikeback technology in the code.  In this episode of MSI Strategy & Tactics, Brent Huston and the techs discuss the various aspects of this technology and how it would affect you.  Discussion questions include:

  1. What is the history of strike back, hacking back and how does it apply to today when you have major teams working to take down bot nets and such?
  2. HoneyPoint has a type of technology called “defensive fuzzing” which does something that has been compared to strikeback. How it is different than other technologies?
  3. What is the current take on the legality of strikeback/hacking back? Are organizations being put at risk if they attack their attackers or if their security teams go on offense?
Panelists:
Brent Huston, CEO and Security Evangelist
Adam Hostetler, Network Engineer, Security Analyst
Phil Grimes, Security Analyst
John Davis, Risk Management Engineer
Mary Rose Maguire, Marketing Communication Specialist and moderator
 

Click the embedded player to listen. Or click this link to access downloads. Stay safe!