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

v2.3

Release 2.3.0
Deprecate Python 3.6
Support Python 3.10
Dependency updates
MISP Output plugin extension
add new public keys ECDSAKeys and ed25519 (#1627)
fix userdb.example (#1619)
cache url submission to virustotal
MySQL connector (#1575) – needs new external dependency mysql-connector-python
Fix mysql string expansion (#1565)
Rewrite CSIRTG output plugin to use new library version
Fixed the Slack output to work with the versions 2.x of slackclient
fix MySQL error handling
fix tar command
limit connections to private address ranges
Update GreyNoise Output Script to Use Community API (#1524)
Implement getopt-style parsing for uname (#1516)
Allow SSLv3 connections for wget and curl
Support for 301 redirects in wget
Malshare update API (#1472)
Remove hpfeeds.py infavour of hpfeeds3.py

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/