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.
A confirming detail from the package repository
Separately from this repository, 45Drives’ own package feed (both the Debian and RHEL builds)
ships a package named samba-vfs-snapshield — described in its own metadata as “Samba VFS
module for Snapshield integration.” That’s independent, public confirmation of the
architecture described on the Samba page: SnapShield is packaged and distributed as
an actual Samba VFS module through the same repository infrastructure as everything else on
this site, not a separate agent or appliance bolted on beside Samba.
Unlike this honeypot tool, though, SnapShield’s own module isn’t open: extracting the actual
package shows a stripped, compiled .so file with no public source anywhere — checked directly
against both the 45Drives GitHub org and
Samba’s own upstream source tree (where its open-source sibling VFS modules, vfs_ceph.c and
vfs_io_uring.c, genuinely do live). That’s expected for a commercial product, and consistent
with everything else this site says about being precise on what’s actually open versus what
isn’t — SnapShield is a real, integrated Samba module, just not one you can read.
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) forkCanaryTek/ransomware-samba-tools— the original project and its author- Samba — the file-sharing protocol this technique monitors