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A honeypot is also a real website or chatroom set up to trap users with other criminal intent, e.g., regarding child pornography, as in Operation Pin.
The term "honeypot" does not come from the Winnie the Pooh stories! In fact the term comes from days of old before indoor plumbing. People living in a city still did their business back then but there was no sewer to take the waste away, nowhere to dump it, so it was collected in a pot. Once a day a wagon would come where by the pots would be emptied into the wagon. The pots were called "honeypots" and the wagon was the "honey wagon". A honeypot is another name for a toilet!
Open relay honeypots include Jackpot, written in Java, and smtpot.py, written in Python. The Bubblegum Proxypot is an open proxy honeypot (or proxypot.)
Programs such as Fred Cohen's Deception Toolkit masquerade as vulnerable network services. When an attacker connects to a service and attempts to break in, they simulate weakness but do not allow the attacker to actually gain control of the system. By logging the attacker's activity, such a system gathers information about the attacks being used, as well as the attacker's own IP address and other information.
The Honeynet Project is a research project deploying networks of honeypot systems ("honeynets") to gather extensive information about "the tools, tactics, and motives" of computer criminals.
Lance Spitzner has generalized this idea to non-computer honeypots in his work on honeytokens.
A honeypot is another name for the plant king proteaThe King Protea (also known as Giant Protea or Honeypot Protea cynaroides is a flower, the largest member of the Protea genus. It is widely distributed in the southwestern and southern parts of South Africa amidst the fynbos kingdom. The king protea is th.
For the "tourist trap" meaning, see honeypot (geography)In geography, a honeypot is a particularly popular attraction within a managed tourist area, such as a national park. Examples include Malham Cove, in the Yorkshire Dales, England, and Old Faithful in Yellowstone, USA. Honeypot sites are often encouraged.