Making honey out of Go or how I stopped worrying and vibed

Honeypots are one of those beautifully deceptive tools in security, that have long been a staple in offensive security and threat intelligence, quietly sitting in the dark, luring attackers in, capturing their tools, tactics, and mistakes. Honeypots provide an organization with proactive, high fidelity defense layer by creating a decoy targets that simulates real IT assets. They are used in everything from red team assessments to large scale intelligence data collection, giving us a front row seat to real world adversary behavior in the wild without waiting to become a victim.

Honeygo started as a simple experiment: what happens if you build a modern, lightweight honeypot from scratch in Go? Somewhere along the way after a few rounds sparring with Gemini 3, that experiment turned into a fully functional system. In this talk, our presenter Thomas Richards will walk us through the journey from barebones scaffold to a working beta version of our honeypot, including design decisions, unexpected challenges, and a few things that broke in entertaining ways. Because it turns out, building a trap is easy, but building one that attackers don’t immediately outsmart is where things get interesting.

Thomas Richards is a principal security consultant with UltraViolet Cyber.

• For more DEFCON DCG518 Group information and updates, check our site https://dc518.github.io/
• Doors open at 1:00pm for social hang out. The presentation starts sharp at 2pm. The Guilderland Public Library is located at 2228 Western Avenue, Guilderland, New York 12084
• This event is free and open to all the community. No attendee limits.

Everyone is welcome!