[acidictadpole]

One of my university courses offered an opportunity for a project like this and I did it with some classmates.

We started by altering the ssh daemon to disallow all logins over this ssh daemon and to log all the usernames and passwords attempted. After a week we gathered thousands of attempts to brute force into the honeypot. Interestingly enough, the passwords used were a combination of the very commonly used ones but also ones that were clearly from other popped boxes.

After a week or so of this we altered the ssh daemon again. This time it would log all attempts but also grant access on the 3rd attempt no matter what the credentials were. The few bots that managed to get in all tried to install various rootkits on the machine, all of which where targeted at a different distro of Linux than we were using so it mostly just busted up our shells output.

It was a long time ago but a great experience.