Honey Pots and Hacker Pots
Honey Pots
Honey pots are open computers that are just waiting for someone to find and exploit. After they are exploited, they are monitored for a time and then legal action is often taken against those using these exploited systems.
Honey Pot machines are used by the Government all the time. It is a known fact that many different Government branches setup honey pots to attract hackers, terrorists and other offenders. A honey pot is a machine that is placed on the Internet wide open for redirect or attack. Everything that is done on or through the system is logged and traced. While the system is being used, complete information about the perpetrator(s) is gathered. The 'hacker' becomes the 'hacked' and after a period of time they have the hacker and his friends right where they want them. If you happen across one of these open honey pot proxy servers, everything that you do and every password that you use will be sniffed and logged. Included below are only a few of the many articles that have been written about this topic.
By Keith Johnson, WSJ Interactive Edition
December 19, 2000 6:01 AM PT
When a group of suspected Pakistani hackers broke into a U.S.-based computer system in June, they thought they had found a vulnerable network to use as an anonymous launching pad to attack Web sites across India. But what they had done was walk right into a trap known as a honeypot -- a specially equipped system deployed by security professionals to lure hackers and track their every move. For a month, every keystroke they made, every tool they used, every word of their online chat sessions was recorded and studied. The honeypot administrators learned how the hackers chose their targets, what level of expertise they had, what their favorite kinds of attacks were, and how they went about trying to cover their tracks so that they could nest on compromised systems. [read the entire article :http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de...]
War drivers beware, the next wireless network you tap might be part of an elaborate sting. By Kevin Poulsen, Jul 29 2002 1:00AM
Hackers searching for wireless access points in the nation's capital may soon war drive right into a trap. Last month researchers at the government contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) launched what might be the first organized wireless honeypot, designed to tempt unwary Wi-Fi hackers and bandwidth borrowers and gather data on their techniques and tools of choice. [read the entire article: http://online.securityfocus.com...]
For a good article on honeypots:
The Value of Honeypots, Part One: Definitions and Values of Honeypots
by Lance Spitzner with extensive help from Marty Roesch last updated October 10, 2001
[read the entire article: http://online.securityfocus.com...]
Hacker Pots
Hacking is at an all time high. The knowledge required to break into a computer system a few years ago took some study and time. Today with the vast library of information and hacking tools, anyone with limited knowledge could get past a firewall or infect a computer with a trojan. Hackers of today, do not require much learning or effort at all. There are many 'over-night' hackers that grow daily one step at a time, looking to learn the next method on the list for finding their victims. Government agencies are not the only ones that setup honey pots. All a hacker needs to do is to put a proxy server up on his, or a victim's computer and wait for a few hours for a scanner to find it. Within a day or two it is on a public list and his packet sniffer is working overtime collecting users credit card numbers, passwords and other personal information. While you use his open proxy server, every web page that you visit, every message that you send and every password that you type is logged. The Hacker Pots work the same way as the honeypots shown above work, only are being run by hackers. You never know when using an open proxy server if you are using a hackerpot or honeypot, but either way you can be sure that someone is watching you somewhere when you are on an open proxy server.
Source: http://theproxyconnection.com/openproxy.html