Show notes
Hey friends! Still your grieving pal over here, but also your swarming friend and Protecting My Network Edge host — because this week I've been tinkering with something called Project Swarm and I've got my diapers on regarding it, but I really, really like what I see so far. Then, fair warning, I flip on the tangent light and verbally barf up some personal stuff at the end. I'll make the hand-off super clear, so if you want your free security podcast to do exactly what you want and nothing else — totally fair, and you won't offend me by hopping off. Here's what we cover:
• What is Project Swarm? This comes to us from our friends over at GreyNoise. It centers around little sensors you deploy to the edges of your network that you can dress up to look like just about anything — attracting flies to the honey, if you catch my drift. You get more enumeration, insight, and logging into whatever shenanigans those flies are using to poke at your edge.
• Setup was refreshingly easy: You need a very low-powered VM or hardware device (my understanding is it even works on a Raspberry Pi) mapped to a public IP, plus a free GreyNoise account. You generate an API key, copy-paste a one-line install, and off it goes. I threw mine on a tiny Ubuntu VM.
• The part where I didn't read the flipping manual: Mid-install my SSH connection dropped and I'm going "what the heck?!" Turns out the installer intentionally moves your real SSH to some arbitrary high port — so you can run a fake SSH honeypot on 22 while your legit connection lives elsewhere. Once I spotted the new port in the console, a quick firewall tweak and I was back in.
• Profiles give me level 14 giggidies: Once your sensor checks in, you assign it a profile. Vulnerable WordPress, Tomcat, a Cisco AnyConnect VPN, FTP honeypot, SSH honeypot — kind of all the honeypots. I went with a vulnerable WordPress instance. My one complaint: you can only assign one profile per sensor. My dream scenario of an SSH honeypot AND an FTP AND a vulnerable Tomcat all on one box will have to wait (or maybe that'd look too suspicious and scare the baddies off — who knows).
• The results were wild: Within a couple days I had thousands of connections, several flagged as malicious and tied to known botnets. I could see source IPs, malicious labels, whether they were residential or company or Google, and even download raw packet captures. There's clearly more telemetry to dig into (what people tried to spray into the login portal, etc.) — I meant to go deeper before recording and didn't, so consider this a "to be continued."
• Why do I care, since I'm not defending some huge infrastructure? Honestly it started as a brain break. But I've been testing a ton of external networks lately and nearly every company site is WordPress — which now powers around 43% of the internet. Running my own WordPress honeypot gives real oomph to those "your out-of-date WordPress is a big deal" conversations, where I can say "I run a WordPress honeypot…
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