About

This site contains stories about the various stuff I’ve found over the past fifteen+ years of running honeypot systems on the Internet. I’ve seen a lot of things and I’ve told a lot of system owners their machines were compromised - and a few of them have even listened. I’ve been yelled at, threatened, and told I didn’t know what I was talking about. What makes it all worthwhile is every once in a while someone actually says “thank you,” and I get the satisfaction of knowing I made the Internet a better and safer place.

For those of you who may not have heard the term before, a “honeypot” is a computer that appears to be running one or more services that look very much like they’re ripe for being hacked. Then, when a hacker comes along and tries to do something bad, the honeypot logs everything that they do. From those detailed logs, we can learn a lot of things about how hackers operate and how their attacks work.

You can follow my honeypot on twitter, where it tweets a time-delayed stream of information about attacks as @netmenaces - it recently sent out its 250,000th tweet.

I try my best to “change the names to protect the innocent.” Sometimes I don’t - mostly when I don’t think there is anyone really innocent.

If you don’t like something… tough. Get your own honeypot…

-TL
Tom Liston
Owner, Principal Consultant
Bad Wolf Security, LLC
Twitter: @tliston
May 6, 2016