Know Your Enemy: Revealing the Security Tools, Tactics, and Motives of the Blackhat Community [Paperback]

A honeynet is the primary tool used to capture attacker's activity. It is a type of honeypot, specifically a high-interaction honeypot. As a honeypot, honeynets work on the concept that they should not see any activity, no one has authorization to interact with them. As a result, any inbound or outbound connections to the honeynet is most likely unauthorized activity. This simple concept makes it highly effective in detecting and capturing both known and unknown activity. Honeynets work as a highly controlled network made up of real systems and applications for attackers to probe and compromise.

The book is about honeynets, how to use them, and what you can learn. The book is broken into three parts. The first part is focused on what honeynets are, how they work, the different types, and technical details on how you can deploy them safely. The second part focuses on how to analyze all the different data a honeynet can collect (network and host based forensics, reverse engineering, centralized data correlation, etc). The third part is specific examples of several honeynets being hacked, including Win2000, Linux, and Solaris. What makes the book so interesting is it ties all these different elements together. You can learn more at http://www.honeynet.org/book/

The book was not written by a single individual, but by leading experts in their field. They attempted to combine the best experiences and skills from some of the leading individuals. The book was organized by the Honeynet Project, but the contributing authors include members of the Honeynet Research Alliance, individuals from the Department of Justice, and others who have helped us in the past and wanted to contribute. Some examples of authors include Honeynet Project members Brian Carrier who wrote several chapters and Max Kilger who wrote about profiling. Honeynet Research Alliance members include the work of the Greek Honeynet Project writing about hacked Linux systems, and the Mexican Honeynet Project writing about hacked Solaris systems. They also had outside experts help out, including Richard Salgado of the DoJ author about legal issues, and Dion Mendel from Australia write about Reverse Engineering.

-- To defend against your threats, you have to first know who your enemy is -- I recommend this book!

The root idea is very simple, put an attractive target on the Internet, wait until it's hacked (and it will be), and then analyze the attack. The first part of the book covers the construction of these attractive 'honeypots'. The second part covers how to analyze the inevitable attack. The third part, which is the most high level, is about the culture of hacking and hackers.

I would recommend this book to anyone involved in securing systems on the open internet who has a good understanding of the technology behind networking and operating systems.

The Honeynet Project grew out of an informal group of computer experts who decided to take an active role in tracking breakins to computers. Existing countermeasures, like firewalls, and frequent patches of discovered firmware bugs, were fundamentally defensive. And did not actively try to understand the capabilities and intentions of the crackers/intruders/blackhats.

This second edition describes what they term Gen 2 Honeynets. These are more sophisticated than Gen 1 networks of honeypots, where a honeypot is a computer expressly deployed for blackhats to intrude upon. The book delves in some length on how to construct a honeypot and a honeynet. Various configurations are possible. A honeypot could mimic a Microsoft computer or a Solaris or linux machine. There is more emphasis on the actual machine being linux, because of the open source nature, which has led to tools like Snort, Ethereal and Sebeb being available. Indeed, Snort-Inline and Sebek were developed by this project.

Lots of craft keyboard sniffing (Sebek) and network sniffing (Ethereal). Plus, variant arrangements like having one computer pretend to be several honeypots are described. Or another, where a honeynet might be physically distant from the production net, but linked to it via a VPN.

All this is scarcely the last word. The blackhats will certainly devour this book to concoct their next generation techniques. You can safely predict an eventual third edition of this book.