Ethereal Networks and Honeypots for Breach Detection

With increasing number of data thefts courtesy of new and complex attack mechanisms being used everyday, declaring the internet as unsafe would be the understatement of the century. For current security experts the scenario is equivalent to an endless cat-and-mouse game across a constantly changing landscape. Hence relying on firewalls and anti-virus softwares is like trying to fight a modern, well-equipped army using sticks and stones. All that an attacker needs to successfully breach our system is the right social networking or the right malware used like a packing or encoding technique that our tools won't detect. Therefore it is the need of the hour to shift our focus beyond edge defense, which largely involves validating the tools, and move towards identification of a breach followed by an appropriate response. This is achieved by implementing an ethereal network which is an end-to-end host and network approach that can actually scale as well as provide true breach detection. The objective is not just blocking; it is significant time reduction. When mundane methods involving firewalls and antiviruses fail, we need to determine what happened and respond. Any industry report uses the term weeks, months, and even years to determine the time of response, which is not good enough. Our goal is to bring it down to hours. We are talking about dramatic time reduction to improve our response, hence an effective breach detection approach is mandatory. A MHN (Modern Honey Network) with a honeypot system has been used to make management and deployment easier and to secure the honeypots. We have used various honeypots such as Glastopf, Dionaea honeypots, Kippo. The dubious activity will be recorded and the attacks details detected in MHN server. The final part of our research is reconnaissance. Since it can be awfully complicated we simplify the process by having our main focus on reconnaissance. Because if a malware or an insider threat breaks into something, they don't know what they now have access to. This makes them feel the need to do reconnaissance. So, focusing on that behaviour provides us a simple way to determine that we have some unusual activity - whether it is an IOT device that has been compromised or whatever it may be, that has breached our network. Finally we deploy MHN, deploy Dionaea, Kippo, Snort honeypots and Splunk integration for analyzing the captured attacks which reveals the service port under attack and the source IP address of the attacker.