What is Deception Technology?

Deception technology comprises cybersecurity solutions designed to identify threats promptly while maintaining low rates of false positives. This technology involves deploying authentic-looking decoys (such as domains, databases, directories, servers, applications, files, credentials, and breadcrumbs) within a network alongside genuine assets to entice attackers. When an attacker engages with a decoy, the technology immediately gathers information to produce accurate alerts, minimizing dwell time and expediting incident response.

Why Is Deception Technology Important?

Regardless of the strength of your perimeter defenses, there’s always a risk of cybercriminals breaching your network. Deception technology tricks them into wasting time investigating planted assets while enticing them into a trap. Once their presence is detected, you gain early insights into their behavior and gather intelligence to counter their actions.

Modern deception technology defenses draw inspiration from historical military deception tactics employed by strategists like Chanakya, Sun Tzu, Napoleon, and Genghis Khan, who used deceit, camouflage, and subterfuge to conquer vast territories. In the cybersecurity context, defenders deploy decoys and lures to mislead attackers into thinking they’ve gained access to the network, ultimately exposing themselves.

Benefits of Deception Technology

In general, the primary advantage of deception is shifting the onus of success onto the attacker rather than the defender. Once your network is populated with decoys, adversaries must execute a flawless attack without being deceived by any fake assets, misdirection, or traps to succeed. Your success hinges on their ability to avoid errors.

Let’s examine five specific benefits of deception that enable this approach:

Enhanced Threat Detection

When it comes to detection accuracy, there are two extremes: signature-based detection, which is highly precise but limited to specific threats, and behavior analysis/heuristics, which cover a broad range of threats but are prone to false positives. Deception alerts combine the best of both worlds—high accuracy with comprehensive threat coverage.

Business Risk Awareness

Traditional security controls often overlook current business risks; for example, antivirus software may not recognize that you are undergoing a merger. Deception can be aligned intrinsically with business risks. For instance, when launching a new product, you can implement deception measures tailored to that initiative, aligning security controls closely with perceived risks.

Expanded Coverage

Deception can be implemented broadly across your organization, including in typically overlooked areas. It can detect threats at the perimeter, on endpoints, in the network, within Active Directory, and across application layers. Additionally, deception can cover often neglected environments such as SCADA/ICS, IoT, and the cloud.

Unlike singular solutions, deception addresses the entire attack lifecycle—from pre-attack reconnaissance to exploitation, privilege escalation, lateral movement, and data loss.

Minimal False Positives

Deception naturally generates very few false positives since only attackers should interact with decoys. Furthermore, the associated alerts offer insights into an attacker’s intentions.

In contrast, behavior analysis often uses machine learning to detect anomalies from a baseline, resulting in false positives. Deception establishes a zero-activity baseline (where any activity warrants investigation) and provides detailed indicators of compromise.

Coordinated Response

Orchestrated or automated response is most effective when trigger events are highly certain. Deception alerts are highly certain and contextual, allowing for the orchestration of complex responses. For instance, decoy credentials redirecting to a decoy environment can be blocked in the real environment, or specific applications can be targeted.

How Deception Technology Works

Modern deception technology actively defends your network by creating a hostile environment for attackers. Similar to honeypots, it saturates your network with fake resources resembling genuine assets that legitimate users never need to access. Utilizing deception-based alerts, it identifies malicious activity, generates threat intelligence, hampers lateral movement, and orchestrates threat response and containment autonomously, without human intervention.

These modern deception platforms employ a proactive, low false-positive detection approach. Advanced analytics decipher the human intent behind attacks, adapt to emerging threats preemptively, and facilitate orchestrated and automated response actions. By eschewing signatures or heuristics for detection, deception defenses cover nearly any attack vector and identify various types of attacks, including APTs, zero-day threats, reconnaissance, lateral movement, fileless attacks, social engineering, man-in-the-middle attacks, and ransomware, in real time.

Upon detecting an attacker on your network, you can dynamically manipulate the deception environment based on your understanding of the attack. Here are some potential actions:

• Adjust the attacker’s experience by introducing or removing deceptive assets.
• Generate network activities, alerts, or error messages to influence specific attacker actions.
• Employ session hijacking techniques to obscure or distort the attacker’s perception of the environment.
• Engineer scenarios that prompt attackers to reveal information about their identity or origins to overcome perceived obstacles.

Deception technology goes beyond complicating attackers’ efforts; it capitalizes on their limited knowledge of the target environment, making it challenging for them to distinguish between real and fake elements. This fundamental shift in power dynamics between attackers and defenders provides valuable insights into attackers’ motives, intentions, and strategies, empowering defenders with a clearer understanding of threat actors’ objectives and methods.

Modern Deception Technology vs. Honeypots

The original tool of information security deception, the honeypot, emerged several decades ago and remains in use today. Honeypots are unprotected but monitored assets created to attract attackers who have infiltrated a network. Once the honeypot is accessed, security operations teams can gather intelligence on the attacker or take action to halt the attack.

Earlier deception technologies like honeypots and honey credentials are essentially reactive and static techniques. They can quickly become outdated and struggle to keep pace with evolving attacker tactics, making it easier for attackers to avoid detection and linger undetected in the network. Honeypots and honeynets exposed to the internet can lead to numerous false positives if the technology fails to differentiate between broad scanning activities and targeted reconnaissance.

Challenges of Legacy Detection Technology

Cyber deception methods operate under the assumption that attackers have breached your perimeter cybersecurity and gained access to your network, endpoints, operating systems, and applications. While other threat detection methods aim to alert security teams to potential threats, they often struggle to effectively combat today’s sophisticated attacks.

Traditional detection tools like firewalls and endpoint detection systems are typically designed for specific types of security (such as network, application, endpoint, IoT devices, etc.) and often operate independently of one another. This leads to several challenges:

• Low-fidelity alerts because these tools can only observe their specific portion of the security infrastructure without context.
• Lengthy investigation times as security analysts must switch between multiple tools to understand the attack sequence and assess the extent of damage.
• High rates of false positives, leading to alert fatigue. A 2021 survey by ESG discovered that 45% of alerts from respondents’ web application and API security tools were false positives.

Furthermore, many existing detection technologies are more effective against malware than against human-driven attacks, whether they originate externally or internally. Advanced malicious actors, far more sophisticated than amateur hackers, excel at mimicking the behaviors of legitimate users to avoid detection. However, when confronted with deception platforms, these actors expose themselves as soon as they interact with a decoy.

What Types of Threats Can Deception Technology Detect?

Deception technology offers the capability to identify threats across the entire kill chain, spanning from reconnaissance to data theft. There are three main categories of use cases:

• Perimeter deception defense: Monitoring all incoming traffic for potential threats is often impractical. By deploying deceptive public-facing assets, this challenge can be simplified, providing actionable intelligence on those targeting your organization.
• Network deception defense: Placing decoys in areas where an attacker might navigate, yet are not necessary for legitimate users, enables the detection of ongoing attacks.
• Endpoint deception defense: Endpoint decoys appear as valuable assets ready for exfiltration to attackers. Monitoring these assets allows for the detection of suspicious activities, including actions that deviate from the norm on the network but are not legitimate on a specific endpoint at a given time.

Should Your Organization Use Deception?

Until recently, the prevailing notion within the industry was that deception primarily benefited organizations with highly mature cybersecurity operations. However, mid-market and smaller organizations can also derive significant advantages from this technology. Deception is progressively becoming a mainstream capability across organizations of all sizes and structures.

Large, Mature Organizations

Proactive, well-funded entities with robust security capabilities utilize deception to enhance their threat detection, internal threat intelligence generation, and response capacities. These organizations aim to identify advanced threats using deception while leveraging low false-positive alerts for proactive threat hunting or integrated response through existing enforcement technologies. This segment of the market has spearheaded the broader adoption of deception.

Mid-Market and Smaller Organizations

Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) in the mid-market and lean security teams in smaller organizations operate within constrained budgets but often face significant threats and risks, such as compliance obligations. While these organizations may have established basic security practices, they require the capability to detect more severe threats swiftly. They require a solution that is:

• Quick to deploy, providing immediate benefits
• User-friendly and low-maintenance, suitable for small internal security teams
• Comprehensive rather than a point solution, given limited budget for multiple technologies
• Capable of wide coverage, including cloud and IoT environments

Deception fulfills these criteria, enabling these organizations to effectively counter advanced, targeted threats.

FAQ’s

What is deception technology, and how does it work?

Deception technology is a cybersecurity solution that involves deploying realistic-looking decoys within a network to trick attackers into revealing their presence. When attackers interact with these decoys, the technology gathers information to produce accurate alerts, minimizing dwell time and expediting incident response.

Why is deception technology important?

Deception technology is crucial because it shifts the burden of success onto the attacker, making it challenging for them to execute flawless attacks. It provides early insights into attacker behavior, enhances threat detection, and enables proactive threat hunting or response actions.

What are the benefits of using deception technology?

Deception technology offers several benefits, including enhanced threat detection, increased business risk awareness, expanded coverage across various environments, minimal false positives, and orchestrated response capabilities.

How does deception technology compare to legacy detection tools like firewalls and endpoint detection systems?

Unlike legacy detection tools, which often operate in isolation and struggle to combat sophisticated attacks, deception technology actively defends networks by creating a hostile environment for attackers. It provides comprehensive threat coverage, minimal false positives, and proactive response capabilities.

What types of threats can deception technology detect?

Deception technology can detect threats across the entire kill chain, including reconnaissance, lateral movement, and data theft. It can be deployed for perimeter defense, network defense, and endpoint defense to identify ongoing attacks and suspicious activities.

Should my organization use deception technology?

Yes, organizations of all sizes and structures can benefit from deception technology. Large, mature organizations utilize it to optimize threat detection and response capabilities, while mid-market and smaller organizations can leverage it for quick deployment, user-friendly operation, comprehensive coverage, and effective countermeasures against advanced threats.

How can deception technology help mid-market and smaller organizations with limited budgets?

Deception technology offers mid-market and smaller organizations a cost-effective solution for detecting severe threats swiftly. It is quick to deploy, easy to use, requires minimal maintenance, provides wide coverage across various environments, and offers capabilities beyond traditional point solutions.

Conclusion

Deception technology represents a pivotal advancement in cybersecurity, empowering organizations of all sizes to combat sophisticated threats effectively. By employing decoys and lures to outwit attackers, it shifts the advantage from assailants to defenders. Offering early insights, enhanced threat detection, and proactive response capabilities, deception technology is indispensable in today’s evolving threat landscape. From large enterprises optimizing security to smaller organizations with limited resources, its versatility ensures comprehensive protection. Embracing deception technology ensures organizations stay ahead of emerging threats, safeguarding digital assets with confidence.