Real-Time Honeypot Forensic Investigation on a German Organized Crime Network

German police raided a military-grade NATO bunker in the fall of 2019, believed to have been associated with a dark web hosting operation supporting a variety of cybercrimes. The organized crime group has gone by the aliases of CyberBunker, ZYZtm, and Calibour (Dannewitz, 2019). While most of the group's assets were seized during the initial raid, the IP address space remained and was later sold to Legaco Networks. Before being shut down, Legaco Networks temporarily redirected the traffic to the SANS Internet Storm Center honeypots for examination. The intention behind this examination was to identify malicious traffic patterns or evidence of illegal activity to assist the information security community in understanding the techniques of a known adversary. Analysis of the network traffic revealed substantial residual botnet activity, phishing sites, ad networks, pornography, and evidence of potential Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The investigation uncovered a possible instance of Gaudox Malware, IRC botnets, and a wide variety of reconnaissance activities related to Mirai variant IoT exploits. A survey of the network activity has been provided with an emphasis on potential botnet activity and Command and Control (C&C) communication.