Deception enables enterprise cyber defense teams to gain detailed intelligence on real attackers, where they came from, what they want, and how they plan to get it. It helps reduce threat risk and enables business agility.
Deception technology sets irresistible traps for attackers, like a worm dangling on a fish hook or the notes of an irresistible siren song. It entices them with fake but realistic assets that look like valuable exfiltration targets and trigger alerts.
Real-time Threat Intelligence
With a deception platform, attackers are greeted with an environment filled with fake yet realistic-looking assets. As the attacker interacts with these fake assets (such as opening a malicious document, logging in to an application, or using a credential), specific information is collected at various levels of the software, creating a detailed activity trace record that can be monitored in real-time.
This threat intelligence, derived from the attacker’s activities, is sent to a central system where it can be used to help security teams identify their attackers and understand their attack tactics, tools, and procedures. It enables them better to protect the organization from attacks in the future and stop attackers in their tracks.
It differs from traditional behavior-based detection tools that rely on signatures or susceptible machine learning algorithms. It generates many false positives that require IT and security teams to follow complicated triage workflows. The threat intelligence from deception-based breach software helps security teams know their enemy far better, allowing them to detect more reliably and quickly and react proactively rather than reactively to mitigate an attack or even prevent a potential disaster before it occurs.
Reduced False Positives
Many existing detection technologies are hampered by false positive alerts, reducing analyst productivity. For example, signature-based detection can be highly accurate but is prone to false alerts (like radar contact with a submarine or a shoal of fish). Behaviors and heuristics are less accurate and more prone to false negatives.
Deception is a proactive detection tool that can help eliminate false positives, saving security teams time and resources. By deploying realistic-but-fake assets like servers, databases, files, and users, deception technology triggers alerts when attackers interact with them. The decoys then provide detailed IOCs and attack intelligence to help analysts stop lateral movement and respond quickly.
Unlike static signatures and heuristics, deception is attacked vector-agnostic, recognizing all attacks, including APTs, zero-days, reconnaissance, lateral movement, malware fewer attacks, social engineering, man-in-the-middle attacks, and ransomware in real-time. By provoking and analyzing bad actors, deception can complement Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools, allowing them to detect threats more reliably. It can also help reduce dwell time by removing the need for manual investigation and teasing out irrelevant activity.
Early Detection
Unlike point solutions that rely on signatures or susceptible machine learning algorithms, deception technologies don’t throw a flood of false alarms. Instead, they raise the signal-to-noise ratio on malicious events so that defenders can track and respond to alerts without getting swamped with “alert fatigue.”
In addition to reducing false positives, deception helps eliminate the response gap by triggering a response when an attacker attempts lateral movement. It can be as simple as quarantining a compromised system used as a launch platform or expiring the credentials of a bad actor that has breached the network.
For forward-leaning, significant security team-type organizations, deception can be a valuable tool to complement their internal threat intelligence and response capabilities. However, it can be out of the reach of mid-market CISOs with limited budgets and security teams. Fortunately, this technology is becoming more accessible thanks to innovations like scalable and affordable cloud-based solutions that enable SMEs to deploy a honeynet with realistic-but-fake assets. A single interaction with a decoy is enough to trigger a response from the defenders and disrupt the attack progression.
Reduced Dwell Time
Dwell time, or the amount of time an attacker spends within a network unnoticed, continues to be a significant issue for many organizations. According to various industry surveys, dwell times have ranged from a (rare) best case of just a few minutes to over 200 days.
These long durations give bad actors plenty of opportunity to engage in surveillance, lateral movement, stealing credentials, and other attack steps that ultimately lead to data theft, POS malware infections, or even breaches.
Fortunately, median dwell times have been dropping in recent years. According to the Mandiant M-Trends 2023 report, they are now down to just over two weeks. But that doesn’t mean organizations should be complacent. They should double down on their efforts to reduce the likelihood of an attack and shorten the time attackers can remain in a network before being detected. To do this, security teams should invest in preventative and detective security controls and an effective deception platform that can help them uncover attacker activity early.
Enhanced Response
A good deception solution will eavesdrop on attackers and gather threat intelligence, providing critical context that can aid in response and mitigation. It will also provide forensic information that is valuable for breach investigations.
Unlike traditional point solutions, which only detect a single threat artifact, deception technology deploys many realistic-but-fake assets (domains, databases, servers, applications, files, credentials, and cookies) throughout the network alongside real ones. Whenever an attacker interacts with these false assets, the system triggers a silent alarm and gathers detailed IOCs, which alert analysts to an intrusion.
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This attack intelligence reveals the attacker’s tactics, techniques, and procedures and can be used to stop their progress or even elicit a confession. It can also be fed into existing detection technologies to improve their effectiveness. It includes reducing the noise of existing signature-based and heuristic detection prone to false positives and addressing blind spots such as cloud environments and SCADA/ICS. The deception platform makes lateral movement in the enterprise difficult for hackers by turning endpoints into dummy traps.
