Cyber Deception Strategy for Active Defense

Enterprises and their security operations centers (SOC) are under a lot of pressure. Cyber threats are affecting the entire security stack, including firewalls, endpoints, and servers. Moreover, security teams lack the workforce and time to analyze all the alerts that are being flagged and most ‘security events’ that are detected only share (simple/basic) information such as notifications for failed connections. Today, attackers use stealthy tactics after breaching the defenses of an organization; they maintain a low profile in the victim’s network and keep searching for valuable and sensitive data. The longer they maintain access to the network, the more difficult it is to detect their trail. Therefore, it is critical for organizations of all sizes to focus on cybersecurity strategies that ensure earlier detection and faster response time to abet such threats.

Cyber deception is a strategy that holds great promise in the cybersecurity landscape. The idea behind cyber deception follows the classic tactic of ‘deception’ used in warfare, planting misinformation to deceive the enemy and take their focus away from the original location, which is more vulnerable. Likewise, organizations also need to understand what bad actors are searching for. Using this knowledge against such attackers, cyber deception lures them to decoy assets that give the illusion of the real data. Traps in the network, endpoints, and servers can be set up to reveal attackers or malicious insiders without them even knowing.

Cyber deception solutions eliminate false positives, since any access to the deception layer consisting of decoys is malicious and that prompts the security teams to investigate the incident. This also reduces the amount of noise generated from multiple layers of security tools, helping teams focus on real threats. The decoys adapt to the organization’s network and cloud environments, which is critical to ensure that the deception components always seem legitimate to attackers. This provides a post-breach defense that is agnostic to different forms of attacks, whether it is spear phishing, drive-by download, or through a vulnerability in a connected device. Furthermore, cyber deception offers security teams the ability to learn about the attacker in a manner similar to how the attacker learns about their targets. Once an attacker breaches a network, their behavior and patterns can be observed, and this information helps security teams respond in the best way.

With advanced threats that have a high rate of success, early detection has become more critical than ever before. Implementing cyber detection technology can significantly increase the effectiveness and efficiency of security teams.