Honeypots for Windows (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

Overview

You are finished with all the hard work of setting up your honeypot system, and rogue traffic is beginning to pour in. Now you need to keep track of all of this activity.

Tracking malicious activity on any type of security system involves four basic processes: taking baselines, monitoring, logging, and alerting. Baselines document activity in its uncompromised state. You must institute monitoring processes that will capture all malicious activity. The captured information should be logged to a database or file for later analysis. High-priority events, such as a honeypot’s initial compromise or a new Internet worm, should initiate one or more alert messages to the administrator.

This chapter describes the different methods and representative applications that you can use to track and monitor your honeypot’s activity. It covers baseline data collection, monitoring mechanisms, and the different forms of logging and alerting on real and emulated honeypot systems.