It was one of those warm summer nights, no clouds, just a bright full moon lighting the way. Someone had unknowingly stumbled upon our honeypot, completely unaware of the fact that her every move was recorded and fully analyzed. Thanks to our deception technology, we could easily reroute the attacker, making her believe she reached her real target.

Today we are releasing the Infection Monkey, our inhouse tool for testing a data center’s resiliency to perimeter breaches and internal server infection. The Infection Monkey is a new open source security testing tool that we’ve developed at Guardicore to test the resiliency of modern data centers to attack. Being good sports, we are sharing it with the security community. Just pick a random machine, release the Infection Monkey and see where it ends up. Use our Monkey to test whether your security systems can detect, stop and contain real threats. The monkey is benign and does not pose any risk to your network.

Over the past few months, we’ve been following a new type of worm we named PhotoMiner. PhotoMiner features a unique infection mechanism, reaching endpoints by infecting websites hosted on FTP servers while making money by mining Monero. The choice of a lesser known currency with a good exchange rate allows the attackers to rapidly gain money while the sophisticated use of safeguards makes it resilient to most disruption attempts, potentially leaving victims infected for years.