A New Honeypot Project for Better Internet Security

Honeypots have been used for a long time to help to deter hacker attacks. They are designed to attract hackers or divert them from their real objective and document their characteristics and actions.


A student named Rist built the honeypot, called Glastopf through the Google Summer of Code (Gsoc) 2009 program, where student developers write code for open-source projects.

"Unlike other Web honeypots that use templates posing as real Web apps, Glastopf basically adapts to the attack and can automatically detect and allow an unknown attack. Glastopf uses a combination of known signatures of vulnerabilities and also records the keywords an attacker uses when visiting the honeypot to ensure it gets indexed in search engines, which attackers often use to find new targets. The project uses a central database to gather the Web attack data from the Glastopf honeypot sensors installed by participants who want to share their data with the database."

For more on this interesting project, see this writeup.