Synopsis

PlugBot project is a security research project by RedTeam Security, led by Jeremiah Talamantes. It is designed to be a proof-of-concept / experimental foray into the development of software that could potentially support the concept of a hardware botnet. The project is made up of two components, PlugBot Bot and PlugBot Command & Control. The hardware component to this project is intended to be single-board computers, such as: Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, Cubox, etc.

Motivation

Jeremiah began developing the concept in early 2010 upon the surge of plug computers into the tech market. Although the development ceased not soon after, the research aspect continued into his dissertation and finally came to life again in early 2015.

C2C Installation

Carry out the following steps to install:

1. Copy the code into your web server's web root
2. Open application/config/config.php and change the encryption_key to arbitrary/random characters (line 232)
3. Open application/config/database.php and set your database's hostname, username and password (lines 51 to 53)
4. Ensure the system requirements below are installed
5. Import the MySQL database from file (db_plugbot.sql) into an empty db titled: db_plugbot
6. Once system is running, change your password!

C2C System Requirements

• Linux OS
• Apache2
• PHP5 (php5-curl)
• MySQL
• Tor
• phpmyadmin (recommended)
• cURL, wput, wget

Configure .htaccess

The PlugBot project is built on the CodeIgniter Framework. To get the C2C to work effectively, you will likely need to add an .htaccess file to the root of your code folder.

	<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	  RewriteEngine On
	  # !IMPORTANT! Set your RewriteBase here and don't forget trailing and leading
	  #  slashes.
	  # If your page resides at
	  #  http://www.example.com/mypage/test1
	  # then use
	  # RewriteBase /mypage/test1/
	  RewriteBase /pb/
	  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
	  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
	  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]
	</IfModule>
	
	<IfModule !mod_rewrite.c>
	  # If we don't have mod_rewrite installed, all 404's
	  # can be sent to index.php, and everything works as normal.
	  # Submitted by: ElliotHaughin
	
	  ErrorDocument 404 /index.php
	</IfModule>

For more information, go here: http://www.codeigniter.com/userguide2/general/urls.html

Login

The default username is admin and the default password is admin.

Tor Setup

If you want your C2C to be a hidden Tor site, visit the link below to configure it accordingly:

https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en

PlugBot Apps

To get started using PlugBot, we've provided the following Gist scripts that can be used with the PlugBot project:

https://gist.github.com/redteamsecurity

Contributors

Jeremiah is an information security consultant, not a developer. Therefore much help is needed to improve the project all around. If you're proficient in PHP / CodeIgniter and want to contribute, contact jeremiah[at]redteamsecure[dot]com. Help is greatly needed!

License

Non-commercial use, share/contribute and provide credit. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License.