On Sunday 24th February, the eve of Mobile World Congress 2019, Avast security researchers Martin Hron, Vladislav Iliushin, Libor Bakajsa, and Anna Shirokova set a project in motion: the deployment of 500 honeypots in 10 countries around the world that would run for the length of the show (four days), and beyond. The idea was to capture the number of attempted connections that potential attackers made to these honeypots in the hope that valuable data might be lurking within. The honeypots, akin to mousetraps on the internet, were purposely set up with open ports typically found in internet-connected devices to trick the attackers who scanned them into thinking they were connecting to routers, smart TVs, security cameras, or other smart appliances. The findings were better (or worse) than they expected.
