Message Board

Installing Honey Pots

setup a standalone honeypot

Author: Z.Zhong (4 Feb 05 4:11pm)

Hi,

Is it possible to setup a standalone honeypot so that itself can trap the spambots, and we can do some test on it by ourselves such as monitoring the traffic and spam emails that are sent to the bait address. Furthermore, control the interaction with the spambots?

thanks
zhenyu

Re: setup a standalone honeypot

Author: M.Prince (4 Feb 05 8:07pm)

I'm not entirely sure I understand your question.

We currently allow any website owner to monitor the stats for any honey pot they install. Unfortunately, it's not possible for us to reroute mail sent to the addresses handed out through a particular honey pot to a particular user. If you'd like to have more of a personal honey pot system that is disconnected from the rest of the Project Honey Pot network then I believe there are some scripts floating around that will help you create one with your own web and mail servers.

An easy solution some people have used is to setup a website where email addresses are handed out for a particular domain with the username filled in as the IP address and a timestamp of the visitor. For example:

192_168_0_1_200502040605@example.com

The mail server handing the domain can then be setup to accept mail to all users, or even just to users meeting that particular format of username.

While relatively easy to setup, the obvious disadvantage is that these email addresses are relatively easy for spammers to spot and remove from their mailing lists.