Conventional wisdom in the cybersecurity world says that the villains have the advantage. After all, they only need an occasional “win” to achieve success. On the other hand, businesses that occasionally fail at cyber defense face a dismal and disastrous future. For this reason, companies must always look for ways to protect themselves with new cybersecurity initiatives.
Deception technology offers some notable advantages among available defensive measures, primarily because of its early-warning capabilities. To use deception, companies deploy resources on their network that hackers find appealing. So, upon entry, intruders will often attack decoys, alerting IT staffers while taking automatic steps to contain the threat.
Intrusion Detection
Generally speaking, deception tech involves the placement of fake resources inside a business network. Since these assets are decoys, no circumstances exist that would cause someone to legitimately gain access to them. So, when they are compromised, they necessarily indicate that someone has gained unauthorized network access. As Doron Kolton explains, “Any access to the deception layer is by definition malicious and the security team has to investigate it immediately. With cybersecurity teams struggling to focus on real threats due to all the “noise” that is generated from the multiple layers of security tools and the lack of personnel to physically triage and investigate each alert.”
Decoys are specially configured to provide alerts when malicious events occur. This feature alone can reduce the time hackers can spend inside a network before being detected from 100 or more days to hours or minutes. Simply by reducing the window of opportunity for attackers, companies can dramatically improve their security.
Forensic Learning
In addition to taking preemptive action, deception tech gives companies a chance to monitor the activities of cybercriminals in their networks before shutting them down. This capability can help firms understand how their attackers operate and discover weaknesses in their IT infrastructure.
Therefore, by implementing deception tech, companies have a way to gain new insights into the tools and tactics that intruders use. This knowledge can be used to take new preventative measures that will frustrate future attacks. In other words, through deception, companies can learn more about hackers than hackers can learn about them.
Unlimited Possibilities
Unlike many detection systems, deception tech requires no complicated signature databases for use in matching patterns. This means that businesses can detect practically any kind of intrusions. These include credential thefts, geo-fencing, distributed data attacks, lateral movements, directory-system attacks, and others.
In conclusion, businesses need to understand deception tech’s role in cybersecurity. Doing so will give them the ability to extend their security strategy beyond detection by giving them insights into how attackers behave while expanding the scope of their defense.