Hello and welcome to the Wednesday, September 24th, 2025 edition of the Sands and at Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, recording day from Las Vegas, Nevada.

And this episode is brought you by the sands.edu graduate certificate program in

penetration testing and ethical hacking. And today's internet storm center diary comes from

one of our undercreated interns, Tyler House. These interns are looking well at honeypot

data. And in this particular case, Tyler looked at what kind of looks like a denial of service attack.

It certainly had a reasonably high volume, about 2.3 million packets from about 6,000 different hosts.

But, well, if it would have been a honeypot and it would have been a

weasel-sized web server, it probably wouldn't be enough to actually cause a denial of service

attack. So one of the things that Tyler was investigating is, well, maybe the denial of service

attack was more kind of a smokescreen to hide any other attacks that may

have been going on the same time. This is certainly not an unknown technique and has been done

in large and smaller attacks alike to essentially distract the analyst and also distract

resources that are then typically more focused on the more visible, the more obvious denial of service attack, and of course also has the more immediate impact, at least initially, in order to then distract these resources and have the actual attack slip underneath that particular

smokescreen. In this case, it wasn't quite that clear. There were some other scans for

Git configuration files and the like that happened around the same time. The denial of

service attack happened. It's possible that that was the attack.

They tried to cover up, but then again,

it wasn't really sort of an attack that was really worthwhile covering up

with any significant amount of resources.

You also have sometimes seen these type of small denial of service attacks being either launched

just by accident, where essentially an IP address was mistaken or maybe a host name, did still

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