The DIY version of an idea that later became a product

While digging through 45Drives’ public GitHub presence, one repository stood out: ransomware-samba-tools. To be precise about attribution: this is an unmodified fork of a project originally created by CanaryTek — 45Drives kept a copy of it, but hasn’t changed a line. It’s included here not as a 45Drives creation, but because the approach it documents is genuinely worth knowing about.

What it actually does

The tool enables full audit logging on a Samba server and watches those logs with fail2ban — when it spots a suspicious pattern (known ransomware file extensions, or activity in a honeypot file planted specifically to attract an infection scanning through shared folders), it bans the offending client’s IP at the network level. Its own README is refreshingly honest about its lineage: the technique isn’t new, and the maintainers point to a German security magazine article as their own inspiration.

Why it’s worth mentioning here

SnapShield, 45Drives’ commercial ransomware-protection product, uses the same conceptual building blocks — honeyfiles and real-time behavioral detection to catch ransomware activity on a Samba share and isolate the infected client — described on its own product page. This repository is not claimed here as SnapShield’s source code or formal predecessor; there’s no evidence of that. What it does show is that the underlying idea (honeypot files plus behavioral detection at the storage-server layer, rather than only at the endpoint) has real, documented open-source roots that predate any single vendor’s product, and that 45Drives was tracking that idea early.

Why that matters if you’re evaluating storage

• The concept is provable, not proprietary magic. You can read exactly how a honeypot-based detection approach works, in a small enough codebase to actually audit, rather than trusting a vendor’s description of “AI-powered detection.”
• It illustrates the gap a commercial product fills. This DIY approach requires you to wire up fail2ban, maintain the regex patterns yourself, and accept real false-positive risk — exactly the kind of operational burden a supported product exists to remove.

Learn more

• 45Drives/ransomware-samba-tools — the (unmodified) fork
• CanaryTek/ransomware-samba-tools — the original project and its author
• Samba — the file-sharing protocol this technique monitors