Honey trap lures hackers

Hanover - The Britain-based computer security firm Sophos is setting a virtual trap for hackers this week at the world's largest information technology fair in Hanover.

Project Honey Train aims to lure hackers to a simulated control system for a rail network to observe and analyse their methods and stay on top of the ever-evolving hacking tactics.

"We want to find out how hackers break into such systems and what they do there," Chester Wisniewski from SophosLabs, which has partnered with the German information technology security provider Koramis on the project, said on Monday at the CeBIT expo.

"It's really difficult to study something like this in the real world," he said.

Honey Train went online on Monday morning and by the afternoon had already undergone thousands of hacking attacks.

More than 7 000 attacks on the cloned system came out of China and more than 6 000 from the US, said Marco Di Filippo, Koramis spokesperson.

Honey Train will be online for six weeks.