Deception Technology - Defence As An Offence

The purpose of Deception Technology is to avoid any serious harm being caused by a cybercriminal who has managed to penetrate a network. The technology works through the generation of traps or deception decoys that imitate legitimate technology assets across the infrastructure.

These decoys can run in the environment of a virtual or real operating system and are designed to trick the cybercriminal into thinking they have discovered a way to escalate privileges and steal credentials. Once a trap is triggered, notifications are transmitted to a centralized deception server which records the affected decoy and the attack vectors the cybercriminal used.

Why use deception technology?

• Reduced risk:
  No security solution can stop all attacks from happening on a network, but deception technology helps give the attackers a false sense of security by making them believe they have gained a foothold on your network. You can track and log their actions from there safe in the knowledge that they will not harm your decoy systems. You can then use the details and strategies found from the actions of the attacker to better protect your network against attack.
• Economical solution:
  While the threat to corporate networks and data is a growing concern, security teams rarely get sufficient budget to deal with the deluge of new threats. Deception Technology is the ideal solution for this particular reason Automated alerts eliminate the need for manual effort and intervention whilst the technology design allows it to be easily scaled as the level of organization and threat increases.
• Wide application:
  Deception Technology can be used in a wide variety of devices, including legacy environments, industry-specific environments, and even IoT devices.

Importance of Deception Technology

One of the most critical criteria for effective application of the Deception Technology is that it must stay new and invisible to the intruder. If the perpetrator believes that they are being tricked, they will do their utmost to escape traps and improve their attempts to hit their real target.

Many security solutions to deception have machine learning and AI incorporated into their core. Not only do these features ensure that deception techniques are kept dynamic, but they also help reduce operational overheads and the impact on security teams by freeing them from constantly creating new campaigns of deception.

What is Cyber Defense?

Cyber defense is about giving an entity the ability to counter cyber attacks through cyber security on the go. It involves all the processes and practices that will defend a network from unauthorized access or manipulation, its data, and nodes. The most common activities in cyber defense will include:

• Installation or maintenance of hardware and software infrastructures to deter hackers.
• Analyze, identify, and patch vulnerabilities in your system.
• Implementation of solutions to spread zero-hour attacks in real-time.
• Getting back from partially or completely successful cyber attacks.

Impact of deception technology on cyber security defense

An increasingly evolving trend is the use of Deception Technology as a feasible method for successful and intelligent post-breach defense in modern information security. But it comes with misconceptions as with any disruptive technology. As cyber criminals tend to phish, trap, trick, and attract people, cyber defenses need to step past finding bad activities in an ocean of positive behavior in the first place.

Cyber defenses need to move beyond being primarily based on detecting bad things.There is a clear case for invoking an active defense to lure, detect, and defend against malware and intruders moving laterally within the network, given how attackers are progressing.

A rapidly emerging phenomenon is the use of deception technology in modern cyber security as a viable means of active, smart post-break defense. And cyber fraud is on its way to the key stage of information defense as a feasible choice for an aggressive defense.

What makes deception work?

To work with deception, you must present to the opponent what appears to be a reality by trying to trick them into engaging with deception decoys or lures, which allows you to learn that they are within your systems and also how they perform the attack. This is an ancient concept that has been used in all aspects of business and life. But we are focusing on how that general concept in the cybersecurity realm is properly implemented.

Additionally, it must be comprehensive and cover an ever-changing surface of the attack to bring deception to its full power. Some vendors offering deception-based cybersecurity focus only on one form of deception — such as credentials, decoys, or data files. But it’s better if you can cover all methods and services of attack by putting credentials and mapped drive objects to attract engagement and decoys to attack in the network, in the cloud, and in specialized places like IoT, POS, and SWIFT. You can make these disappointments ubiquitous with today’s virtualized technology, which gives you the highest probability of detecting an attack wherever it occurs.

What type of activities does the deception system detect?

• Credential Theft
• Man-in-the-middle
• Sensitive Data
• Geo-Fencing
• Attacks on the directory systems
• Lateral Movement
• Detecting attacks on data distributed outside your organization

Benefits of using deception technology

Utilizing deception has many benefits.:

• Foremost of these is to locate and remediate. It decreases dwelling time and the meantime.
• It also provides deeper information on what makes deception work. Forensics of adversary intelligence including compromise indicators (IOCs) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) through engagement.
• It is also not dependent on knowing every vector or method of the attack and is designed to detect early recognition, credential theft, and lateral motion.
• Furthermore, as long as you realize that there is a new place to attack, you can quickly and in some situations instantly put decoys around the new vital assets that are at risk.

Role of Infopercept in Defense Technology:

Deception provides a means to change the balance of force between the attacker and the defender. The attacker has had power in the past. They have to succeed only once, while the defender has to succeed every time.

Today, the defense can easily predict the attack of deception, know the techniques of the enemy, and build an aggressive countermeasures strategy to outsmart their foe. Attack analyzes and forensics are much more actionable and efficient and high-fidelity warnings allow emergency management measures such as blocking, quarantining and danger detection to be automated. The SOC (Security Optimization Center) team at Infopercept works to ensure there are no data leakages with automatic response systems to eliminate the possibility of a serious attack.