Honey Pot Effect: A small, local business gains big profits from a surge of tourists.
A small town might benefit from a surge in visitors—especially if it’s the kind of tourists who spend lots of money and take in the sights. But these kinds of influxes can create a host of issues, from overcrowding and litter to strain on facilities and transport networks. So, what can a local government do to mitigate these issues?
It could try to lure these visitors away from other locations. One way to do that is by deploying cyber bait, also known as a honeypot, or a fake network that looks like the real thing and lures in hackers by offering security vulnerabilities and information that’s valuable to them. Honeypots are designed to look exactly like the target they’re modeled after and can be anything from a computer system to a fake internet of things device.
Cyber criminals are drawn to these decoy systems and are encouraged to use them to gain access to a company’s network. Once they’re on the system, the malicious actors are tracked and their behavior assessed. This provides a wealth of intelligence that’s often used to detect and mitigate attacks on an organization’s production systems.
The honeypot concept has gained popularity in the security industry as a result of increasing data breaches, the rise of IoT devices and the proliferation of malware. It’s also a way to test and improve security technologies without affecting the live environment.
There are a variety of honeypot types, each with its own unique set of advantages and disadvantages. For example, a malware attack honeypot can mimic an attacker’s attack vectors and provide an accurate picture of their activities in the network. Other examples include USB drive attack honeypots, which can detect and report on the behavior of attackers who connect to a network via a Universal Serial Bus (USB) device.
Another category of honeypot is a research one, which collects more detailed intelligence on the attacker’s methods and capabilities. It’s usually more complicated than a production honeypot and can be interconnected with other honeypots on a network.
Despite the advantages of a honeypot, it’s not foolproof. Experienced adversaries can learn to tell the difference between a honeypot and an actual network, and can even spoof detection tools by flooding a honeypot with attack traffic in an attempt to distract security staff. That’s why organizations that use honeypots need to employ preventative and detection techniques in order to limit their impact. These include using preventative measures, such as a strong password policy, and detection techniques, such as using threat intelligence. A honeywall or firewall is also an effective way to limit the number of points that an attack can traverse in the network.