Multi-purpose Web Application Honeypot to Detect Multiple Types of Attacks and Expose the Attacker’s Identity

Abstract

 Anti-virus and firewall programs are software programs that protect a system from intruders and various types of viruses. While these software programs are very effective against known viruses, they have certain vulnerabilities. Attackers may use these issues as a medium to launch an attack on the system. Such perilous situations demand a mechanism which takes on cyberattacks and studies them, further using the obtained knowledge to prevent such attacks. One such mechanism is a honeypot which creates a virtual trap to lure attackers. An intentionally compromised computer system allows attackers to exploit vulnerabilities while exposing their identity. They also reduce the risk of false positives, when compared to traditional cybersecurity measures, because they are extremely unlikely to attract legitimate activity. The proposed scheme is an implementation of such mechanism. It is a Web application which exposes the attacker’s identity when he/she applies any of the three strategies to attack on the application. These strategies would be brute force attack, static resource attack and use of web scraping