Many people think of honeypots when they hear the word deception, but today’s solutions go far beyond static traps. They’re active – luring attackers to fake assets that mimic production environments, exposing lateral movement tactics, and more.
Any interaction with these fake assets will trigger high-fidelity alerts and allow defenders to observe the attack in progress, making it much easier to stop.
It’s a Game Changer
The good news is that the new methods of detecting cyberattacks are revolutionizing cybersecurity. One method, deception technology, turns the tables on attackers by using a mix of traps and lures to bait hackers into interacting with fake assets. When they do, their actions are recorded and reported. This allows defenders to learn more about the threat: who is it, why are they in the network, and where do they want to go?
Deception is a critical component of many CISOs’ cyber posture arsenal. For forward-leaning, big-budget organizations with well-developed security functions and large teams, deception is used to optimize detection and internal threat intelligence creation and leverage low false-positive alerts for proactive threat hunting or integrated response through existing enforcement technologies. It also enables them to cover blind spots in their infrastructures, including those in the cloud, IoT devices, and SCADA/ICS systems.
For mid-market CISOs, who usually operate on a much tighter budget and may have fewer team members, deception offers an affordable way to gain a decisive advantage over attackers. It is a cost-effective way to detect in-network reconnaissance, lateral movement attacks (hackers trying to move east-west or across the organization’s networks), credential theft, and Man-in-the-Middle attacks. It is a powerful tool for defending against spear phishing and other targeted attacks.
It’s a Deterrent
Deception technology is a deterrent, making it much harder for bad actors to infiltrate networks, systems, and applications.
The best deception solutions can offer multiple layers of deception to cover all environments that attackers will be targeting, including the network, endpoint, active directory, and application layer. They are also designed to be easily deployed and managed, ideally through a centralized console. They are attack-vector agnostic and don’t rely on signatures or heuristics to detect attacks, making them effective against all known and unknown threats, including APTs, zero-days, reconnaissance, lateral movement, and malwareless attacks.
Many SOC analysts spend over a third of their time dealing with false positives generated by traditional anomaly and intrusion detection/prevention tools. Deception technology solutions, on the other hand, drastically reduce these false positives and generates attack intelligence that enables security teams to take action against real threat actors. It’s not a silver bullet, but it can be a powerful addition to your security stack and help you close the gap between attacker and defender.
It’s a Deception Powerful Tool
Adding deception technology to an organization’s cybersecurity measures allows defenders to change the attack asymmetry. While it cannot stop attacks from successfully penetrating the network, it can make them waste time exploring worthless planted traps while baiting them into revealing themselves. Once attacker behavior and techniques are spotted and recorded, this information can block further malicious activity or even trigger the launch of countermeasures.
Unlike point solutions that rely on generic threat intel feeds, deception technology creates threat intelligence by engaging attackers in real time and delivering the relevant info to security teams. This drastically cuts down on false positive alerts that can cripple productivity and drag security teams through confusing triage workflows. Deception is also designed to work on various systems, including legacy environments, industry-specific infrastructure, and IoT devices.
One of the essential requirements for cyber deception is that the traps must remain indistinguishable from the tangible assets, or the attacker will quickly learn they are being lured into a fake environment. Leading deception solutions have machine learning and AI built into their platforms to keep the traps fresh and indistinguishable from tangible assets while reducing operational overheads for security teams. This dramatically improves the Mean Time to Know (MTTK) for security teams, allowing them to analyze an attack, fingerprint their TTPs, and launch countermeasures in minutes instead of days or hours.
It’s a Cost-Effective Solution
Deception technology reveals an adversary’s activity in real-time. It is designed to work flexibly within enterprise environments and security information event management (SIEM) systems, delivering threat intelligence in formats that security teams can easily use. It is also attack-vector agnostic and doesn’t depend on signatures or heuristics for detection. It detects the actions of an attacker, whether reconnaissance, lateral movement, privilege escalation, malware, or ransomware, and helps security teams to stop attacks and minimize damage. Great post read about SEO Services with Yostrato.
By deploying fake IT assets, credentials, and information that legitimate users should never access, the adversary must continually go through hoops and make mistakes to reach their goal. This creates a new level of risk that forces them to reconsider their targets and tactics and imposes significant costs on them, making it more difficult for them to succeed.
Deception technology is an excellent investment that delivers a solid return on investment. Larger, forward-leaning CISOs and their teams adopt it to optimize their detection, internal threat intelligence creation, and response capabilities. In addition, it reduces dwell time by alerting on malicious activity, thereby reducing the time an attacker can remain undetected. This dramatically cuts the cost of a data breach, which has been estimated to be proportionally higher for breaches with longer dwell times.