Security & Threat Intelligence · 25.07.2026, 15:29 UTC
_HELP_ME_ESCAPE_FROM_BELARUS_PLEASE_ [Guest Diary], (Tue, Jul 7th)
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Security & Threat Intelligence |
| Quelle | SANS Internet Storm Center ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 25.07.2026 UTC |
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[This is a Guest Diary by Jason Callahan, an ISC intern as part of the SANS.edu BACS program]
Every so often a honeypot hit comes along that is less about the exploit and more about the intent behind it. While reviewing DShield logs I ran into a scanning bot that caught my eye: a URI string that appeared to be a plea for help.
On 2026-06-06 my DShield honeypot logged back-to-back HTTP requests from the same source IP hitting two different ports with both carrying an identical, oddly formatted request path:
The request path itself /?_HELP_ME_ESCAPE_FROM_BELARUS_PLEASE_ is not a known exploit path, it appeared to be a plain-text message in the URL. Searching my logs for that particular string returned around a dozen similar HTTP requests over a 2 months period. These came from various IPs from around the globe with no discernible pattern which pointed to a self-propagating bot rather than a single attacker.
Further research showed that this bot was first reported to ISC in May 2026. The number of reports peaked shortly after the first report before a sharp drop and has remained steady since. [1]
I was unable to locate much more information about this bot other than a reddit thread on r/selfhosted describing the same requests hitting a Traefik reverse proxy. According to that thread, the user emailed the address embedded in the User-Agent and received a reply pointing to a page on a free web-hosting service. The page is a static HTML document with no scripts and it lays out what the bot is & why it exists.
The author, who identifies himself only as “Alex,” claims to be …