UK Honeynet Project 

The Honeynet Project has recently completed a major internal restructuring, which sees the end of the Research Alliance and a move to a new Chapter based membership model (for example, we become the Honeynet Project’s UK Chapter). You can find out more about the new organisation, it’s bylaws and further membership information here.

As part of this restructuring process, active Honeynet Project members have elected a new Board of Directors and assigned various operational positions for the next three years. This includes David Watson from the UK group, who becomes a Honeynet Project Director and it’s Chief Research Officer.

With the restructuring process now complete, we are looking forward to getting back to honeynet research and development. A second, larger phase of our Global Distributed Honeynet (GDH) is already planned for 2008, along with more collaboration with other active security research groups.

The Honeynet Project published it’s annual status report today, which includes a round up the R&D activity undertaken by members during the previous year. Details of some UK Honeynet Project are also included.

Lance Spitzner was one of the keynote speakers at Hack-In-The-Box 2007 in Malaysia this week, and talked about some of the research we have been involved in recently (including the Honeynet Project’s Global Distributed Honeynet initiative – GDH, which David led). More details can be found at the conference web site.

Long time Honeynet Project members Niels Provos and Thorsten Holz’s book “Virtual Honeypots: From Botnet Tracking to Intrusion Detection” was released in the US last month but has only just become available here in the UK recently. It has picked up a number of good reviews, and we highly recommended it for a good background on honeynet technologies and their uses.

For the last six months, David Watson has has been leading the Honeynet Project’s Global Distributed Honeynet (GDH) initiative. Phase One of the GDH initiative concluded 31/05/07, with a three month status report being delivered to members of the honeynet research community 01/07/07. We are now looking at how we release more of our findings to the public, and also how best to continue our research in future GDH phases.

The Honeynet Project has begun the process of opening its development mailing lists and svn repository up to the public, with a development wiki to follow soon too. The first project to go public is Honeysnap, led by members of the UK Honeynet Project, so please sign up if you are interested and actively using Honeysnap.

UK Honeynet Project and German Honeynet Project initiates new centralised malware collection project with the Honeynet Project Research Alliance.

Honeynet Research Alliance bi-annual reports published.