Honeypot (cybersecurity)
Honeypot(cybersecurity)
A honeypot is a cybersecurity mechanism that uses a manufactured attack target to lure cybercriminals away from legitimate targets. They also gather intelligence about the identity, methods and motivations of adversaries.
A honeypot can be modeled after any digital asset, including software applications, servers or the network itself. It is intentionally and purposefully designed to look like a legitimate target, resembling the model in terms of structure, components and content. This is meant to convince the adversary that they have accessed the actual system and encourage them to spend time within this controlled environment.
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The honeypot serves as a decoy, distracting cybercriminals from actual targets. It can also serve as a reconnaissance tool, using their intrusion attempts to assess the adversary’s techniques, capabilities and sophistication.
The intelligence gathered from honeypots is useful in helping organizations evolve and enhance their cybersecurity strategy in response to real-world threats and identify potential blind spots in the existing architecture, information and network security.
What Is a Honeynet
A honeynet is a network of honeypots that is designed to look like a real network, complete with multiple systems, databases, servers, routers and other digital assets. Since the honeynet, or honeypot system, mimics the sprawling nature of a typical network, it tends to engage cybercriminals for a longer period of time.
Given the size of the honeynet, it is also possible to manipulate the environment, luring adversaries deeper into the system in order to gather more intelligence about their capabilities or their identities.
How Does a Honeypot Work in Cybersecurity?
The basic premise of the honeypot is that it should be designed to look like the network target an organization is trying to defend.
A honeypot trap can be manufactured to look like a payment gateway, which is a popular target for hackers because it contains rich amounts of personal information and transaction details, such as encoded credit card numbers or bank account information. A honeypot or honeynet can also resemble a database, which would lure actors that are interested in gathering intellectual property (IP), trade secrets or other valuable sensitive information. A honeypot may even appear to contain potentially compromising information or photos as a way to entrap adversaries whose goal is to harm the reputation of an individual or engage in ransomware techniques.
Once inside the network, it is possible to track cybercriminals’ movements to better understand their methods and motivations. This will help the organization adapt existing security protocols in order to thwart similar attacks on legitimate targets in the future.
To make honeypots more attractive, they often contain deliberate but not necessarily obvious security vulnerabilities. Given the advanced nature of many digital adversaries, it is important for organizations to be strategic about how easily a honeypot can be accessed. An insufficiently secured network is unlikely to trick a sophisticated adversary and may even result in the bad actor providing misinformation or otherwise manipulating the environment to reduce the efficacy of the tool.
Benefits and Risks of Using a Cybersecurity Honeypot
Honeypots are an important part of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. Their main objective is to expose vulnerabilities in the existing system and draw a hacker away from legitimate targets. Assuming the organization can also gather useful intelligence from attackers inside the decoy, honeypots can also help the organization prioritize and focus their cybersecurity efforts based on the techniques being used or the most commonly targeted assets.
Additional benefits of a honeypot include:Ease of analysis. Honeypot traffic is limited to nefarious actors. As such, the infosec team does not have to separate bad actors from legitimate web traffic – all activity can be considered malicious in the honeypot. This means that the cybersecurity team can spend more time analyzing the behavior of cybercriminals, as opposed to segmenting them from regular users.Ongoing evolution. Once deployed, honeypots can deflect a cyberattack and gather information continuously. In this way, it is possible for the cybersecurity team to record what types of attacks are occurring and how they evolve over time. This gives organizations an opportunity to change their security protocols to match the needs of the landscape.
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