For individuals and smaller orgs I've sort of felt like keeping your head down, running a wg/ssh bastion with a non-standard port maybe along with single packet auth or even plain old port knocking to reduce log spam from random drive-by is more effective and attainable for places without any sort of dedicated security or even constant in-house IT staff. Running a tarpit on a VPS seems like it'd fail to bother most these days, and running it on an actual IP seems like at best it'd have no effect and at worst if it ever actually held up a scanner and the operator noticed they might decide to direct some actual attention to that IP, or at least throw a mild ddos at it for a bit. Am I wrong or out of date on that? I'm all for sticking it to bad actors and efforts to reduce the economic incentives, but in 2020 tarpits strike me as kind of obsolete with some risk to boot.
Running a tar pit is a bit like installing a trap on a bike in order to teach bike thieves a lesson. It won't really reduce the problem, but for a lot of people the idea of vengeance gives a bit of a warm happy feeling.
It's more like approaching a thief and persuading him to steal some bike "just around the corner", then guiding him around endlessly. While he's following you, he's also not stealing anything from anyone, his attention (which is naturally finite) gets drained - even just a little bit - to the benefit of the community as a whole. It's not necessarily about vengeance.
Maybe it is reducing the problem, but not enough people are installing traps to make a noticeable difference? Or the number of new thieves is cancelling out the number of thieves being put out of business by traps? Is there data for this?
Or maybe the traps just aren't sophisticated enough?
Sure, it's unlikely, but I don't see what I'd be gaining using fail2ban in the first place. I don't leave password authentication enabled, of course.
Log spam is a bit annoying, but at the end of the day, who cares? Even with the ongoing attempts, my authlog is like 300K uncompressed today and 60-120K per day gzipped. Whatever.
If I cared about that I would prefer to just block Chinese IP ranges outright.
Good. Isn't that the point? Also, I like your use of the word punishment as something negative in this context.
Some people decide to launch a DDOS attack or something like that in retaliation. It doesn't always happen, but there have been instances of an attacker being thwarted and then trying to punish the victim (who successfully defended themself) in some other way.
What's the deepest level any bot has gotten?
Not really, no. If I ever rebuild my website, I will probably add some stats though :D
(sorry)
Pretty clever!
5420 levels seems to be the limit:
This one, right at the limit of 5420, works:
https://darkwiiplayer.com/bot-dungeon/M1Kt80XBcvk4ofn2m2IqRV...
(YMMV, some browsers might have their own url length limitations)
This one, at 5421 levels, breaks:
https://darkwiiplayer.com/bot-dungeon/M1Kt80XBcvk4ofn2m2IqRV...
I currently have 22 clients stuck it in across three machines. When I started out it was more like a thousand, so seems they've largely adapted.
I'm not sure we should be writing new network connected daemons in C though.
In general, yes. However, in this case--no, that's not helpful advice--because this program doesn't actually receive input from clients! Kind of hard to trigger exploitable behavior on a program that only sends output.
It wouldn't suprise me to find there were still possible exploits
We're a long way from "Smashing the Stack", people are aware of mitigation and the care that needs to be taken, precautions have been made inside operating systems and compilers.
Not a lot of activity over the time I ran it, and I know that the port gets hit more than that. I had a much better time when I ran a honeypot with Kippo:
https://github.com/desaster/kippo
It was much more useful as it gave me a great list of IP's to block from all my systems ;)
It's sort of like those YouTube channels where they waste phone scammers' time in an entertaining way. [0] Obviously, the easiest thing for the callee to do is hang up the phone, but their goal is to make phone scams less profitable.
This can also be automated, so the defender doesn't even need to waste their own time on it. Eg: https://old.reddit.com/r/itslenny/ .
tarpit will likely hurt yourself as the system ties up sockets for a long time and you'll run out eventually. You'd have to combine the tarpit with something to limit the number of connections you accept.
IMO, setting up ssh on another port has been useful, especially combined with port knocking. And of course turning off password auth.
It can be called "Initial Connection Delay": Once a new TCP connection is established, wait for an uncertain number of n seconds before read and respond to the handshake request.
Of course, this functionality is only available in non-standard SSH servers such as the one from Bitvise.
Here's the kicker: The server wasn't even used to send mail and hadn't been for a long time. So we had to apply for a delisting from a mail blacklist for a server that didn't send mail so that a customer could use an API.
The admin thought they were being clever, but instead they were just being difficult.
