Security Incidents: Re: Cracked; rootkit - entrapment question?

[lance () KSNI NET (Lance Spitzner)]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Drew Smith wrote:

>       I'd like to create a honeypot of sorts; a chroot environment that looks
> and feels like the machine, and that allows the cracker to do everything
> he normally would want to from the shell.  I'd like to log everything to
> another machine, and get the police in on it.
>
>       My question is this:  how far can I go while remaining legal?  Is this
> entrapment?  I really despise these kids - if you're going to hack my
> machines, at least show some prowess at it!  They did, unfortunately,
> wipe the utmp and wtmp entries, remove themselves from all the logs, etc
> - so I don't really have too much to start from.
I've been running honeypots for almost a year now, with great success.
I have yet to have any legal/entrapment issues.  However, I have been using
honeypots to learn the tools/tactics of the bad guys, not to catch them.
For me, a successful honeypot means the badguys never knew they were being
watched.  I wrote up a paper on this, "To Build A Honeypot".

http://www.enteract.com/~lspitz/honeypot.html

Hope that helps ...

Lance