What is a Honeypot?

A Honey Pot system is setup to be easier prey for intruders than true production systems but with minor system modifications so that their activity can be logged of traced. The general thought is that once an intruder breaks into a system, they will come back for subsequent visits. During these subsequent visits, additional information can be gathered and additional attempts at file, security and system access on the Honey can be monitored and saved.

Generally, there are two popular reasons or goals behind setting up a Honey Pot:

1. The general idea is that since a record of the intruder’s activities is kept, you can gain insight into attack methodologies to better protect your real production systems.
2. Gather forensic information required to aid in the apprehension or prosecution of intruders. This is the sort of information often needed to provide law enforcement officials with the details needed to prosecute.
3. The common line of thought in setting up Honey Pot systems are that it is acceptable to use lies or deception when dealing with intruders. What this means to you when setting up a Honey Pot are those certain goals have to be considered. Those goals are:

The Honey Pot system should appear as generic as possible. If you are deploying a Microsoft NT based system, it should appear to the potential intruder that the system has not been modified or they may disconnect before much information is collected. You need to be careful in what traffic you allow the intruder to send back out to the Internet for you don’t want to become a launch point for attacks against other entities on the Internet.

You will want to make your Honey Pot an interesting site by placing "Dummy" information or make it appear as though the intruder has found an "Intranet" server, etc. Expect to spend some time making your Honey Pot appear legitimate so that intruders will spend enough time investigating and perusing the system so that you are able to gather as much forensic information as possible.

The information gathered from a Honey Pot system is used for prosecution purposes, it may or may not be deemed admissible in court. While information regarding this issue is difficult to come by, having been hired as an expert witness for forensic data recovery purposes.

Whether hacking organizations will rally against an organization that has set "traps" and make them a public target for other hackers. Examples of this sort of activity can be found easily on any of the popular hacker’s sites or their publications.