i have made a http sniffer, which is useless these days.
then i ran & tested MitMproxy on my lan : https://mitmproxy.org/

installed Suricata in IPS mode and made custom rules that stores executable files in a folder called Filestore, made a perl script that automatically submits those executables to virustotal...

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload

...and moves those exe's to folder called "infected" if there is positive results from virustotal's reply.

now i am making little program that sends positive files of Clamav scan to virustotal.
i am not sure what kind of project i should start next, any ideas welcome, some kind security related network program would be one i would like to do.

i have been thinking about some kind of honeypot program that i should install & test and write automatic submission of files it gets from bad guys.

If you can get your own TLS certificates on to the target clients then you could expand the HTTP sniffer to cover HTTPS.

A while back, I started implementing SSH in Perl but was slow about it and a week into the project, someone else published a working Python implementation. With certain knowledge, it is not that hard, though I had to pick up that knowledge along the way. If you were to make a Perl implementation of SSH, you could watch what passwords the bruteforcers attempt or even pretend to let them in and see what they try to do by capturing all incoming strings without actually doing anything.

i did that with Mitmproxy. its one thing i could do again

that is good idea. ill have to it.

"That sounds like a good and typical 'Perl' thing to do."

Also bear in mind that Perl has the CPAN contributed-software library, which IMHO is one of the best and most mature collections available anywhere. Before you do anything "new" with Perl, canvass that library very carefully to see if someone has already done it. Also, look for packages which are soliciting help and contributors.

of course, i check cpan almost weekly, there is nice modules everywhere xD

ok, just setup mitmproxy and are sniffing one of my host, http(s).
ill have to rewrite my sniffer tho

at least i have a good project to practice perl

Nice.

Code a solution finder for the pentomino puzzle.

Make it find all possible solutions for a given board configuration, or print an error message if the given board configuration is invalid (ie, the number of empty squares is not divisible by 5, or the number of empty squares is greater than 5 * [how many pentominoes there are])

Make it print the solutions in pretty colours using ANSI escape codes and make it format them in a pretty way, perhaps using the unicode box drawing characters.

I had a go at it myself and got it up and running: https://github.com/dusthillresident/...le-solver-in-C

This program solves pentomino puzzles and prints out some nice colourful terminal text graphics.

If you look at the contents pages of the books listed here https://bookauthority.org/books/best-perl-books, you'll probably get some inspirations ....
(Okay, so skip the Learning Perl & Perl 6 books)