Hosting Your Own Honeypot: A Look Into T-Pot

At VERDESEC, we believe that cybersecurity learning becomes far more meaningful when people can see real systems, real data, and real outcomes. With that in mind, we hosted an online sharing session titled “Hosting Your Own Honeypot at Home Using T-Pot.”

The session was designed to introduce students to the practical side of threat observation using T-Pot, an open-source honeypot platform that combines multiple tools into a single deployment. Instead of discussing honeypots only in theory, we focused on showing participants how they could actually set one up and use it to observe activity from the internet in a controlled way.

We began by walking through the setup process, covering how to download, build, and run T-Pot. The session aimed to make the deployment approachable for learners who were interested in experimenting with security tools outside of a classroom environment. By breaking the process down step by step, participants were able to see that setting up a home lab honeypot was both achievable and highly educational.

To make the session more engaging, we also presented the results of running the honeypot for a week. This gave participants a chance to see the kind of traffic a public-facing system can attract, from automated scans to suspicious connection attempts. For many attendees, this was one of the most eye-opening parts of the session, as it connected theory with observable real-world behavior.

Another highlight was the demonstration of the Elastic dashboard and its query capabilities. We showed how the collected data could be visualized and explored, allowing participants to identify patterns, inspect events, and better understand what the honeypot had captured. This part of the sharing helped emphasize that collecting data is only one part of the process, meaningful analysis is just as important.

The participation and feedback were encouraging, and many attendees found the session informative and useful as an introduction to practical defensive security concepts.

Through sessions like this, VERDESEC continues to support students by making cybersecurity more accessible, hands-on, and relevant to real-world practice.