How Automated Deception Technology Fits in with Preemptive Cybersecurity

Preemptive security is a cybersecurity practice designed to neutralize potential attacks before they happen. It involves collecting and analyzing predictive threat intelligence to detect attacks in their early stages, then implementing controls to shut down the attacks before they begin.

Deception is a critical component of the preemptive security toolkit. The ability to redirect attackers’ focus to fake assets protects the organization’s real systems and offers the potential to collect valuable threat intelligence.

Deception Technology 101

Deception has long been part of cyber defense and information gathering. Honeypots are fake systems that are designed to lure attackers into targeting them rather than real systems. Often, this is accomplished by intentionally leaving vulnerabilities in these systems and making them appear to contain valuable data or functionality.

Over time, deception techniques have evolved to address changing threats and incorporate new technologies. For example, an organization may only create a single deceptive account or set up an entire network. AI and automation have also expanded the scope and quality of security deception.

How Automation Elevates Deception

Deception is only effective if a honeypot or other deceptive system is realistic enough to fool an attacker. Otherwise, they’ll realize their error and start looking for the real systems in an organization’s environment, undermining the purpose of the deception.

Creating and managing deceptive environments is labor-intensive, limiting their scope and authenticity. Automation offers the potential for organizations to develop highly realistic and scalable deceptive environments with minimal overhead.

Dynamic Decoy Placement

Ideally, deception technologies consume a significant amount of the attacker’s time, and force them to reveal various tools and techniques used in their attack. To accomplish this, an organization generally needs to have several decoys deployed in a way that allows an attacker to move from one to another while feeling like they’re making progress in their attack.

Automated deception enables decoys to be deployed dynamically on an as-needed basis. Based on the tools and techniques that an attacker demonstrates, the deception solution can select and place new decoys for them to identify. This reduces the overhead associated with maintaining the deception while allowing the attacker to expend significant effort investigating and exploiting the deceptive systems.

AI-Driven Lure Selection

Honeypots and other deceptive technologies are designed to draw an attacker toward them and away from an organization’s real assets. At the same time, these solutions can’t be obvious fakes that cause an attacker to look again for the real assets.

AI-driven lure selection enables deception technologies to select lures that maximize the probability that an attacker will target one of their deceptive systems. For example, an organization that observes an attacker scanning for certain, well-known vulnerabilities might dynamically deploy a honeypot containing one of them to draw the attacker in. This intelligent lure selection ensures that there is something that an attacker can target without having an array of vulnerable systems deployed that are obvious honeypots.

Instant Attacker Finger-Printing

In addition to protecting an organization’s real assets from cyberattacks, deception technologies also provide the ability to collect threat intelligence about an attacker. Within a deceptive environment, anything that happens is unauthorized and suspicious by definition. This allows an organization to more easily isolate the signs of an attacker’s activities on the system.

AI and automation enable this threat intelligence to be collected more rapidly and at scale. Automated systems monitoring a deception environment can identify the signs of an active attack and combine this with threat intelligence to identify the attacker’s likely tools and techniques. This data can be used to bolster defenses on an organization’s real systems by ensuring that controls are in place to detect potential attacks and that any targeted vulnerabilities have been patched.

ROI: From Early Warning to Threat-Intel Feed

Honeypots and other deceptive technologies provide various benefits to the organization. The simplest of these is the fact that any time and resources spent attacking an organization’s fake systems aren’t being used to target real, valuable assets. Often, attackers who waste significant time targeting an organization with nothing to show for it will give up and start looking for easier targets.

The other main benefit of cyber deception is the ability to learn how an attacker would target an organization’s network and systems. If the deceptive environment mimics the organization’s real systems, attackers are likely to use the same malware, techniques, and exploits to attack it. By enticing attackers into their deceptive environments, organizations can gain visibility into new and evolving attack campaigns and ensure the effectiveness of their defenses against them.

Deployment Pitfalls to Avoid

Deception technology can be an invaluable tool for an organization’s security program; however, it can also backfire if decoys are obvious fakes and detectable by an attacker. When designing and deploying a deceptive environment, it’s important to ensure that decoys are designed to be realistic and offer maximum benefit to the business. 

Some common pitfalls include:

• Implausible Decoys: Deception technologies must look realistic to draw attackers in and waste their time. Organizations need to understand the current threat landscape and the techniques that attackers are likely to employ to design vulnerable systems that look realistic.
• Mismatched Environments: Deceptive environments are most valuable when they provide insight into how an attacker would target an organization’s real-world, critical systems. A failure to identify critical assets and design decoys for them robs the business of the chance to collect useful threat intelligence.
• Static Decoys: Real systems evolve over time as they’re used by employees and the business changes and grows. Failing to update and change decoy systems — including applying patches for some newly discovered vulnerabilities — results in out-of-date systems that are obvious to an attacker.
• Lack of Visibility: Deception technology can provide valuable insight into attackers’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), but only does so if the organization has visibility into its deceptive environment. A failure to integrate decoys into the corporate security stack limits the organization’s ability to use them as an early warning system or a source of threat intelligence.
• No Response Plan: Decoys have the potential to act as an early warning system for an impending cyberattack. However, this is only useful if the organization is monitoring the signals that these systems produce and has an incident response plan in place for acting on this information.

Deploying Deception Technology with IONIX

An effective cyber deception platform requires extensive knowledge of both an organization and the threat actors likely to target it. Realistic decoys mimic an organization’s real-world, high-value assets. They also offer opportunities for an attacker to demonstrate their TTPs while moving through the decoys toward their intended goal.

The IONIX platform provides an organization with the insight that it needs to deploy deception systems for maximum ROI. IONIX constantly monitors and maps an organization’s environment, identifying critical assets and workflows. It also performs simulated attacks to identify exposures and map attack chains that can be used to access valuable data or sensitive functionality.

The intelligence and context provided by IONIX can help your organization build the tools needed to misdirect attackers and gain access to predictive threat intelligence for pending attacks. 
Learn more about how IONIX can help bolster your organization’s security by booking a free demo.