Every attack here makes others safer
How one home lab turns every attack it receives into protection for others
My home lab is attacked all day, every day. Instead of only blocking those attacks, I turned them into protection for other people.
Here is what happens when an attacker finds what looks like an easy server.
Contents · 8 sections
1. The trap #
Mass scanners sweep the internet for open logins. One of my machines answers like a slightly neglected Linux box. It is a high-interaction honeypot: a convincing shell, a believable file system, fake services. They think they are in.
2. Everything is recorded #
Every username and password tried, every command typed, every file downloaded. So far that is more than 638,000 login attempts.
3. Web attacks are recognised too #
A behavioural detection engine reads every request to my websites: exploit attempts, brute force, CMS scanners, path traversal. Each one is classified and scored.
4. Blocked at the edge #
The verdict goes straight to the router. The attacker’s address is dropped at the network edge before it can reach any real service.
5. Shared #
The verdict goes to a community network of defenders, whose members stop the same address before it ever reaches them. One trap here, protection for strangers elsewhere. It works both ways: almost 19,000 verdicts have come back to me.
6. Turned into intelligence #
The strongest cases become published threat-intelligence dossiers, more than 800 so far.
The numbers #
At the time of writing, counted from production rather than estimated:
- 557,000 honeypot sessions
- 10,787 unique attackers, from 177 countries
- 53,789 active blocks
- 16.6 million web log lines analysed
A glass building #
Picture a glass building on a busy street. It looks open, even vulnerable. But the glass is bulletproof, the offices behind it are screens playing a fake, and the real work happens in a bunker below. Every recording is shared, so the attackers don’t just fail here: they make every other target harder to hit.
All of it runs on one machine, built and operated by one engineer near Iași, Romania. The live figures refresh every 15 minutes on the Defense page.