root@markcardiff:~/honeypot-reviews$ ./render weekly --public-safe
Weekly Cowrie SSH Honeypot Report
Public-safe weekly SSH honeypot telemetry summary. Coverage is 28 Sep 2026 – 4 Oct 2026 UTC. Raw transcripts, payload code, attacker key material, credentials, and sensitive operational details are intentionally omitted.
35,699Sessions
1,208Unique source IPs
23,344Failed logins
10,659Accepted logins
Summary
- Observed 35,699 connection sessions from 1,208 unique source IPs across 217,685 Cowrie JSON events.
- Authentication automation produced 23,344 failed attempts and 10,659 accepted honeypot logins.
- Post-login activity generated 13,148 command events; median observed closed-session duration was 1.33 seconds.
- Captured artifact activity included 1,833 successful download events, 1 failed download events, and 98 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 | 35,699 |
| Unique source IPs | 1,208 |
| Failed login attempts | 23,344 |
| Accepted honeypot logins | 10,659 |
| Command events | 13,148 |
| Successful file download events | 1,833 |
| Failed file download events | 1 |
| File upload events | 98 |
Common behavior themes
| Theme | Matching command events |
|---|---|
| recon | 8,009 |
| destructive or evasion | 2,906 |
| persistence | 1,424 |
| downloaders | 80 |
| mikrotik probe | 8 |
Selected public-safe indicators
These indicators are provided for defensive awareness only and should not be treated as attribution.
| Indicator | Context |
|---|---|
| 109.160.32.121 | 1,600 sessions |
| 109.160.32.38 | 1,600 sessions |
| 109.160.32.144 | 1,099 sessions |
| 109.160.32.111 | 1,099 sessions |
| 109.160.32.37 | 1,099 sessions |
| http://213.232.114.14/handshakebins.sh | 124 URL observation(s) |
| http://213.232.114.14/nokillbins/handshakebins.sh | 84 URL observation(s) |
| tftp://213.232.114.14/tftp1.sh | 69 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.