The HoneyMap Offers Real-Time Glimpse of Cyber Attacks as They Happen

It's kind of fun to watch unless your computer is the one under attack.

9/28 9:35am

HoneyMap (screengrab)

The Honeynet Project has made monitoring the war in cyber space weirdly fascinating with its HoneyMap, which displays malicious attacks as they happen. The result is reminiscent of old animated maps from newsreels reporting on battles during World War II.

The Atlantic Wire explains how to read the HoneyMap:

Each red dot that pops up when you go to the map represents an attack on a computer. Yellow dots represent honeypots, or systems set up to record incoming attacks. The black box on the bottom says where each attack is coming from as they come in.

The Honeynet Project is a worldwide chain of honeypots that track these attacks. As The Atlantic reports, some members of the network aren’t pushing their data to the map, so it currently tends to display more attacks across Europe.

Betabeat observed several attacks occurring across Brazil and fewer in the United States, though it appears computers in Google’s home city of Mountain View, California and Microsoft’s area of Washington State are under sustained attack throughout the day. A large number of the attacks come from various locations in Russia, however we spotted a few actually coming from servers in Mountain View.

Try to not lose a few minutes gazing at the HoneyMap making exploding sounds with your mouth as each red dot bursts on the screen.