root@markcardiff:~/honeypot-reviews$ ./render weekly --public-safe
Weekly Cowrie SSH Honeypot Report
Public-safe weekly SSH honeypot telemetry summary. Coverage is 21 Sep 2026 – 27 Sep 2026 UTC. Raw transcripts, payload code, attacker key material, credentials, and sensitive operational details are intentionally omitted.
48,797Sessions
1,032Unique source IPs
28,190Failed logins
19,060Accepted logins
Summary
- Observed 48,797 connection sessions from 1,032 unique source IPs across 309,331 Cowrie JSON events.
- Authentication automation produced 28,190 failed attempts and 19,060 accepted honeypot logins.
- Post-login activity generated 21,295 command events; median observed closed-session duration was 1.28 seconds.
- Captured artifact activity included 1,556 successful download events, 0 failed download events, and 75 upload events.
Key observations
- Commodity SSH automation remains constant: high-volume credential attempts rapidly transition into system reconnaissance after an accepted honeypot login.
- Observed command themes were dominated by Linux reconnaissance, SSH access manipulation/persistence attempts, and cleanup/evasion behaviour.
- Source IPs are published only as defensive indicators; they may represent compromised hosts, scanners, VPN/proxy nodes, or short-lived cloud infrastructure rather than actor-owned systems.
Activity metrics
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Sessions | 48,797 |
| Unique source IPs | 1,032 |
| Failed login attempts | 28,190 |
| Accepted honeypot logins | 19,060 |
| Command events | 21,295 |
| Successful file download events | 1,556 |
| Failed file download events | 0 |
| File upload events | 75 |
Common behavior themes
| Theme | Matching command events |
|---|---|
| recon | 16,126 |
| destructive or evasion | 3,045 |
| persistence | 1,529 |
| mikrotik probe | 8 |
| downloaders | 7 |
Selected public-safe indicators
These indicators are provided for defensive awareness only and should not be treated as attribution.
| Indicator | Context |
|---|---|
| 109.160.32.61 | 3,297 sessions |
| 109.160.32.45 | 2,198 sessions |
| 109.160.32.43 | 2,198 sessions |
| 109.160.32.48 | 2,198 sessions |
| 109.160.32.21 | 1,100 sessions |
| http://213.232.114.14/handshakebins.sh | 6 URL observation(s) |
| http://213.232.114.14/nokillbins/handshakebins.sh | 6 URL observation(s) |
| tftp://213.232.114.14/tftp1.sh | 4 URL observation(s) |
Defensive takeaways
- Monitor internet-facing SSH for short-lived login bursts followed by system reconnaissance and downloader or staging behaviour.
- Alert on post-auth writes to
.ssh/authorized_keys, repeated process-kill cleanup, suspicious downloaders, and unusual client-version/HASSH clusters. - Use honeypot-derived indicators as weak signals and correlate with production telemetry before taking blocking action.
Limitations
- This report summarizes honeypot telemetry only; it does not imply compromise of production systems.
- No attribution is asserted from this data.
- Public output omits raw payload code, full attacker keys, detailed transcripts, credentials, and sensitive operational details.