About Us

Honeynet Project was started to gain a better insight into the methods of crackers - those who break into other people's computer systems.

By setting up vulnerable computer systems which are closely monitored, or by writing programs to emulate certain vulnerabilities, we can observe the actual course of events.
This has a couple of advantages; the analysis is fairly straightforward and "compromises" are much more plentiful than examining real systems that have been compromised.
When you're recovering a real system, the pressure is to get it working again as quickly as possible, not to write a nice paper on how you were compromised.
Having said that, analyzing attempted and actual compromises leads to building better honeypots, and building better honeypots gives us better insights on how to deal with compromises. If we can block the vectors used to download malicious content, that will provide a multilayered approach to security, together with trying to eliminate the vulnerability in the first place.
That means, if we make a mistake in either there's still a good chance that our server will survive.

The main HoneyNet project is at www.honeynet.org.

Since April 15th 2006, the NZ Honeynet Project is officially a member of the Honeynet Research Alliance.

The full members are:

Russell Fulton - University of Auckland

Christian Seifert - Victoria University of Wellington

Ramon Steenson - Victoria University of Wellington

Additional contributors are:

Bojan Zdrnja - University of Auckland

Mike Seddon - Telecom New Zealand Limited

Chris Steenkamp - State Services Commission, New Zealand

Terry Bowden - Boweden Services Ltd

John Gould - Wellington Intitute of Technology

Dr Richard Nelson - University of Waikato

Alumni:

Jamie Riden - jamesr@europe.com