markcardiff.tech:/honeypot-reviews/cowrie-ssh-honeypot-weekly-2026-10-05-to-2026-10-11.html
root@markcardiff:~/honeypot-reviews$ ./render weekly --public-safe

Weekly Cowrie SSH Honeypot Report

Public-safe weekly SSH honeypot telemetry summary. Coverage is 5 Oct 2026 – 11 Oct 2026 UTC. Raw transcripts, payload code, attacker key material, credentials, and sensitive operational details are intentionally omitted.

Coverage 5 Oct 2026 – 11 Oct 2026 UTC
Posture public-safe
Timezone UTC
39,938Sessions
1,244Unique source IPs
30,961Failed logins
7,194Accepted logins

Summary

  • Observed 39,938 connection sessions from 1,244 unique source IPs across 226,640 Cowrie JSON events.
  • Authentication automation produced 30,961 failed attempts and 7,194 accepted honeypot logins.
  • Post-login activity generated 9,113 command events; median observed closed-session duration was 1.42 seconds.
  • Captured artifact activity included 1,412 successful download events, 3 failed download events, and 93 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

MetricValue
Sessions39,938
Unique source IPs1,244
Failed login attempts30,961
Accepted honeypot logins7,194
Command events9,113
Successful file download events1,412
Failed file download events3
File upload events93

Common behavior themes

ThemeMatching command events
recon4,700
destructive or evasion2,699
persistence1,348
downloaders20
mikrotik probe6

Selected public-safe indicators

These indicators are provided for defensive awareness only and should not be treated as attribution.

IndicatorContext
77.239.124.1481,107 sessions
77.239.124.1501,107 sessions
77.239.124.1471,099 sessions
77.239.124.1461,099 sessions
109.160.32.1181,002 sessions
http://213.232.114.14/handshakebins.sh18 URL observation(s)
http://213.232.114.14/nokillbins/handshakebins.sh12 URL observation(s)
tftp://213.232.114.14/tftp1.sh10 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.