A honeypot is also a fake website or chatroom set up to trap users with other criminal intent, e.g. regarding child pornography, as in Operation Pin.

Table of contents

1 Spam Honeypots 2 Security Honeypots 3 External Links 4 Alternative Meanings

Spam Honeypots

Spammers are known to abuse vulnerable resources such as open mail relays and open proxies. Some system administrators have created honeypot programs which masquerade as these abusable resources in order to discover the activities of spammers.

Open relay honeypots include Jackpot, written in Java, and smtpot.py, written in Python.

The term "honeypot" is believed to come from the Winnie the Pooh stories, in which Pooh finds himself stuck inside a pot of honey which he intended to eat.

Security Honeypots

Programs such as Fred Cohen's Deception Toolkit masquerade as vulnerable network services. When an attacker connects to a service and attempts to break in, they simulate weakness but do not allow the attacker to actually gain control of the system. By logging the attacker's activity, such a system gathers information about the attacks being used, as well as the attacker's own IP address and other information.

The Honeynet Project is a research project deploying networks of honeypot systems ("honeynets") to gather extensive information about "the tools, tactics, and motives" of computer criminals.

External Links

• Honeypots, Intrusion Detection, and Incident Handling Resources

A honeypot is another name for the plant king protea.