SANS ISC: First Exploit Attempts For Juniper Backdoor Against Honeypot - SANS Internet Storm Center

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Just a quick update: We do continue to see an increasing trend in login attempts to our honeypot using the backdoor password. If anybody has a vulnerable device to "donate", I would like to send some of that traffic to it (need it to be accessible in an isolated network. Do not need it shipped :) ).

 

We are detecting numerous login attempts against our ssh honeypots using the ScreenOS backdoor password. Our honeypot doesn't emulate ScreenOS beyond the login banner, so we do not know what the attackers are up to, but some of the attacks appear to be "manual" in that we do see the attacker trying different commands.

We saw the first attempt at 17:43:43 UTC about an hour after I adjusted the kippo honeypot to return the Netscreen banner.

The most popular usernames so far:

+---------------+----------+
| username      | count(*) |
+---------------+----------+
| root          |       29 |
| admin         |       18 |
| netscreen     |        8 |
| login         |        8 |
| administrator |        5 |
| test          |        4 |
| system        |        2 |
| bob           |        1 |
| sdes          |        1 |
| sqzeds        |        1 |
| sqzds         |        1 |
+---------------+----------+

The most frequent source IPs for this attack so far:

+-----------------+----------+
| ip              | count(*) |
+-----------------+----------+
| 83.82.244.85    |       24 |
| 84.104.21.148   |        8 |
| 176.10.99.201   |        7 |
| 88.169.13.26    |        7 |
| 76.18.66.48     |        5 |
| 64.39.109.5     |        4 |<- Qualys (probably "research")
| 198.50.145.72   |        4 |
| 2.239.22.90     |        4 |
| 86.195.19.248   |        4 |
| 80.123.56.190   |        3 |
| 64.39.108.99    |        2 |
| 79.120.10.98    |        2 |
| 62.42.12.8      |        1 |
| 192.99.168.52   |        1 |
| 94.210.22.151   |        1 |
| 174.114.144.109 |        1 |
+-----------------+----------+

Based on hour of day (UTC, Dec. 20th)

+------+----------+
| hour | count(*) |
+------+----------+
|   17 |        1 |<- honeypot was adjusted 16:55 to return Netscreen banner
|   19 |       25 |
|   20 |       14 |
|   21 |       23 |
|   22 |       15 |
+------+----------+

---
Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D.
STI|Twitter|LinkedIn

Defending Web Applications Security Essentials - Secure DevOps Summit & Training 2018

How you go about changing Kippo banner?

Find this line in core/honeypot.py

t.ourVersionString = 'SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.9p1 Debian-5ubuntu1.3'

and change it to
t.ourVersionString = 'SSH-2.0-NetScreen'

then restart kippo.

Or in kippo.cfg change ssh_version_string setting to

ssh_version_string = SSH-2.0-NetScreen

Aren't the Juniper backdoor accounts 'Username1' and 'Username2' ?

I don't see any attempts against those accounts in your post.

no, the backdoor can be used with any username with one specific password (which was chosen to look like some debugging code fragment...)