Deception technology in cybersecurity is on the rise because security experts are working on the double to boost network defense through better cybersecurity measures.
Deception is a dishonest or illegal method that is used to either get something or to make people believe that something erroneous is true. It could be malicious attempts and attacks, phishing and spoofing attacks, or stealing someone’s critical information through social engineering.
Deception is also described as the act of hiding or concealing the truth, especially if it’s to the deceiver’s advantage. Deception technology is a new cybersecurity defense tactic that protects companies and organizations instead of exploiting their vulnerabilities.
What Is Deception Technology?
Deception technology is a tool that security professionals have been using for both defensive and offensive strategies. It has been used by security specialists for a long time. It is a new technique used to counter cyberattacks.
The purpose of deception technology is to play as a decoy to prevent a cybercriminal from doing further damage should the person have been able to infiltrate the system. The way it works is by generating decoys and traps to imitate authentic company assets throughout the whole system. These decoys are intended to lure the cybercriminal into thinking that they’ve found a better server to harvest credentials from.
Previous versions of deception technology involved an individual making careful interaction with the cybercriminal to make them think that they have successfully accessed critical data and keep them occupied until the threat has been contained and dealt with accordingly. Modern deception technology involves less human interaction where sensors are distributed all over the systems’ data, network, applications, and endpoints. The distributed sensors imitate important assets and applications. These sensors would not be accessible to anyone, and it would contain fake data credentials and information.
At the moment an intruder gets access to these fake assets, notifications are sent through a centralized deception server that registers and stores information from the decoy and the strategies that were used by the cyberattacker. Notifications are sent to inform whether an intruder or it might just be a policy violation that intruded.
Another purpose of deception technology is to lessen the dwell time of an intruder in your system. Dwell time refers to the period that a cyberattacker remained in your system undetected. Longer dwell time means that the intruder has more time to either cause damage, exploit more vulnerabilities, or create more vulnerabilities in your system. Deception technology seeks to reduce the dwell time and stop the attacker from completing their attack.
The Decoy Network
Believability and credibility make up a good decoy network. The decoy must have a balance between being heavily guarded and being too vulnerable. The decoy network must feel, look, and behave like it is part of your company’s system. The decoy network must have effective camouflage. The strategy for the decoy must blend with the environment, as much as the decoy network must blend.
The way it blends determines the effectiveness of its protection. When deception technology is done correctly, its sensors will blend throughout the network, including the devices, accounts, users, folders, and files in the network. Expertly blending in would not alarm the attacker. Thus the intruder would not be able to distinguish the differences.
Putting Deception Into Practice
Deception technology is integrated fully into the different aspects of the security protocols. The purpose is to detect all intrusions that can breach traditional controls and avoid, as much as possible the false positives. Along with making the decoy network camouflaged within the real system, make sure to place lures or files and documents that will serve as bait. The bait should be scattered throughout the network. The traps are set for attackers that can infiltrate your systems’ basic defenses.
Once an attacker takes the bait and uses the fake credential within it, this will alert the system that the attacker has not been alerted of the decoy. From this point, the decoy strategy must be able to lure and guide the attackers away from the real network with different baits and lures to lead them into the decoy network. Once there, the threat can be contained, monitored, and analyzed.
To put deception technology to proper work, companies and their security team must understand what makes it work effectively.
1. Deception must look authentic.
For deception to work, the decoy must seem real to the attacker so that you can lure them in so we can see how they will conduct the attack. You must be able to present a perspective that is so believable and authentic that they would not know that it is a decoy.
2. Deception must be comprehensive.
The scope of the deception must cover more than one topic. Most providers of deception technology tend to promote tech that only focuses on one specific topic. It would be best to find one that covers more areas and more than just one topic so that the deception would cover areas such as specialized places IoT, SWIFT, POS, and telecommunications environments along with your usual network and cloud environments.
3. Deception must be scalable.
Deception technology is about putting decoys and baits all over the system environment. Once those are accessed, you would know that there is a problem that needs to be resolved. It lessens the occurrence of false positives because you are not focusing on traffic analysis or even the behavior of your database, which are prone to a high occurrence of false positives. Deception technology, once deployed, must be automated along with a periodic check and refresh to maintain its authenticity. Because of machine learning, deception campaigns are now easily deployed in a large environment. Machine learning also enables deception technology to learn and make appropriate proposals from what it has learned.
Why Use Deception Technology?
One reason for the use of Deception technology is the acknowledgment of the inevitable occurrence of cyberattacks. Cybersecurity experts agree that there are determined cyber attackers that will find a way to access your critical information or assets. The use of traps and baits allows for the implementation of both prevention and incident response should an intrusion triggers the traps and evidence has been confirmed that an intrusion has started.
Another reason for Deception technology is the acknowledgment that most cyberattacks are aware of the contextual environment that they are trying to infiltrate. The strategy and method of attack change because of this awareness. Whether the attack is made by a human or an automated attack, it is crucial to use deception technology that can make appropriate changes and proposals in equations to favor the defense strategy.
These two factors have convinced security teams to carry out the effective implementation of Deception technology to the systems they are protecting.
Conclusion
Deception technology is not a new technique to fight against cybersecurity intrusions. There have been servers that have been designed to deceive malware into contacting cybersecurity enforcers and researchers instead of cybercriminals. The technology has grown and advanced to the point that machine learning is used to automate its processes and protocols. Deception technology gives you the advantage of early detection and therefore be able to apply the accurate response.
This technology not only provides early detection, but it gives a way to study the method of attack being employed by the automated cyberattacks. The extracted information from the detection of the intrusion helps process the proper and accurate response. Deception technology helps in enhancing the network security of your secured environment. It is worthwhile to do in-depth research on Deception technology if you are considering using it to protect your critical information and assets.
