alt Hacker NewsOP here.
site: https://knock-knock.net
Every server with port 22 open gets hammered by bots trying to brute-force SSH. I built a honeypot that accepts every connection, records the credentials they try, and displays it all on a live dashboard with a 3D globe.
Some fun things you'll notice:
- Bots try the same passwords everywhere — "admin", "123456", "password" are the classics. Yes, you'll see the Spaceballs password in the top 10.
- Certain countries and ISPs dominate the leaderboards
- Attacks come in waves — sometimes nothing for a minute, then a burst of 50 from one IP cycling through a wordlist
- There's a knock-knock joke panel because I couldn't resist
Originally inspired by my kids asking "who keeps trying to log into your computer?" when they saw me tailing SSH logs.
The stack is Python (FastAPI + paramiko for the honeypot), Redis pub/sub for real-time updates, SQLite for stats, and globe.gl for the visualization. WebSocket pushes every knock to your browser as it happens.
The whole thing runs on a $6.75/year VPS. The domain costs more than the server.
Replies
Very nice! I am looking forward to many people running this. Perhaps people could add their URL in a ./contrib directory or something to that effect? I might set this up when I get back from the feed store.
> who keeps trying to log into your computer?
I'm curious, how do you think this helps you answer the question? Proxies are incredibly easy to come by these days, rotation makes it hard to identify what's behind it all.
Awesome, I loved it thanks for sharing it.
And I remember more than a decade ago I went down the rabbit hole hunting these bots and indeed, I found Netherlands was always the king of hill when it comes to bots, followed by US, Netherlands still there I see.
Well done, OP.
This is neat. What VPS service do you use? I am trying to replace my tendency to spin up small EC2 instances just to deploy a simple web app.