What is Cowrie

Cowrie is a medium interaction SSH and Telnet honeypot designed to log brute force attacks and the shell interaction performed by the attacker.

Cowrie is developed by Michel Oosterhof.

Features

Some interesting features:

• Fake filesystem with the ability to add/remove files. A full fake filesystem resembling a Debian 5.0 installation is included
• Possibility of adding fake file contents so the attacker can cat files such as /etc/passwd. Only minimal file contents are included
• Session logs stored in an UML Compatible format for easy replay with original timings
• Cowrie saves files downloaded with wget/curl or uploaded with SFTP and SCP for later inspection

Additional functionality over standard kippo:

• SFTP and SCP support for file upload
• Support for SSH exec commands
• Logging of direct-tcp connection attempts (ssh proxying)
• Forward SMTP connections to SMTP Honeypot (e.g. mailoney)
• Logging in JSON format for easy processing in log management solutions
• Many, many additional commands

Files of interest:

• cowrie.cfg – Cowrie’s configuration file. Default values can be found in cowrie.cfg.dist
• data/fs.pickle – fake filesystem
• data/userdb.txt – credentials allowed or disallowed to access the honeypot
• dl/ – files transferred from the attacker to the honeypot are stored here
• honeyfs/ – file contents for the fake filesystem – feel free to copy a real system here or use bin/fsctl
• log/cowrie.json – transaction output in JSON format
• log/cowrie.log – log/debug output
• log/tty/*.log – session logs
• txtcmds/ – file contents for the fake commands
• bin/createfs – used to create the fake filesystem
• bin/playlog – utility to replay session logs

Changelog v2.5

• Datadog output module (Fred Baguelin frederic.baguelin@datadoghq.com)
• General improvements to shell expansion handling
• New version of Twisted supported
• Python 3.11 support
• Pypy 3.9 support
• Add session type to Telegram output

Docker

Docker versions are available.

• Get the Dockerfile directly at

  https://github.com/cowrie/docker-cowrie

• Run from the Docker registry with:

  docker pull cowrie/cowrie

Install

Use

Copyright (c) 2009 UPI Tamminen All rights reserved.

Source: https://github.com/micheloosterhof/