Are you being hacked: Results of one week of home HoneyPot data.

The michiefs are varied. It can range from installing software, trojans, stealing personal information or data, identity theft to rendering my computers less efficient or forcing me to reinstall the operating system. As well, the intent of nations such as China or Iran can be detrimental to the national interests of Canada...

Update: 20 minutes after posting this article, Videotron (my ISP) has responded. They thank me for my letter of march 21st and for my recommendations. They assure me that they have a team to handle these type of situations. I guess I will have to follow-up with them in a few weeks ;-)

Of course, the results have nothing to do with Videotron. I'm certain there same results would be seen in any such large network where many users are likely to be connected 24hr a day, 7 days a week.

the important aspect of this is that honeypot actually highlights your computer as vulnerable - so the results are meaningless for anyone not using honeypot.

I use a firewall. I have tested this and a hacker would not be interested in my computer because it does what any reasonable firewall program should do, that is make your computer appear invisible. Hackers cannot see my computer so no attempts are make.

I'm sure if i put on honeypot and was waving about like a flower in the sun, then I would experience similar results.

The answer - use a good firewall (both hardware and software based) and don't install any programs that invite hackers!!

I am trialing this software, I also will report its findings to my Isp, perhaps if we all did that we would help rid the internet of these pests. 

I agree that implementing a firewall with proper policies, keeping it up to date and verifying the logs is an excellent way to mitigate your own risks. I also have a security architecture in place on my home network. In the case described in the article and as a teacher in IT security at a College and in a graduate University program, my interest was to see what is going on out there.

I feel that some if this stuff would, or should, interest my ISP. It certainly should help to convience my neighboors that they need to do like you and implement a firewall, or at least configure their router. If you look at another article I wrote on WiFi security, you may notice that some people do not seem to take any risk mitigation measures. These are the people I am trying to convince to reconsider their ways. Obviously you have already reached a higher level of IT security maturity.

By the way , I ran the honeypot in my DMZ.

Please note Matte's comments and my response before you go to far with this It should be a part of a security architecture to implement a secure network but other things are needed such as a properly configured router, a firewall, an anti-virus (up to date), service patches loaded and up to date.

Other usefull tolls include an intrusion detection system, such as SNORT. Nessus and Microsoft baseline security analyser (if you are on windows) can also help by giving information on your vulnerabilities.