Everything You Need To Know About Threat Deception Platforms (FAQs)
What Are Threat Deception Platforms?
A threat deception platform is designed to enhance an organization’s security posture by actively misleading threat actors trying to enter the network. These solutions detect attackers, anticipate their attacks, and then use deceptive techniques to lure them further and confuse them. This, in turn, makes it more difficult for them to identify and exploit real vulnerable points and assets.
By convincing malicious actors that they have successfully breached the network and can carry out their attacks uninterrupted, threat deception platforms can gather valuable intelligence regarding how attackers work. This allows them to improve their preventative security controls in real time by detecting, analyzing, and defending against zero-day and advanced attacks.
Threat deception takes a proactive approach to cybersecurity, one that compliments traditional security measures such as antivirus solutions, intrusion detection systems, and firewalls. Deception technology is relatively new, but is gaining popularity quickly as a means of preventing cyber attackers from both carrying out their attacks, and from learning of genuine vulnerabilities or weak points than might help them do so in the future.
How Do Threat Deception Platforms Work?
Threat deception platforms work by creating decoys and traps that emulate natural systems. This deceptive approach works because of the way most attackers operate, which is typically by penetrating secured environments and then looking for ways to build persistence, which often means dropping a backdoor. As well as the backdoor, attacker will generally attempt to move laterally within the organization, utilizing any guessed or stolen credentials to access restricted areas, collect data and systems of value, and deploy additional malware and exfiltration data.
Traditional anomaly detection and intrusion prevention systems aim to spot attacks in progress on their networks and systems, but the issue with these tools is that they rely on signatures to identify attacks. These can experience a high level of false positives. Threat deception platforms, however, tend to have a higher threshold for triggering events, and these events are typically threat actors conducting attacks in real-time.
When considering employing one of these platforms it is useful to consider the following:
- To be as effective as possible, threat deception platforms need to be capable of being deployed throughout the enterprise’s entire environments, and so should be able to scale in accordance with that environment.
- Centralized Management. A threat deception platform may be tasked with managing deceptive assets for hundreds or even thousands of endpoints. With a centralized management console, this task is far easier to accomplish, and also makes scaling up or down easier to manage.
- Integration. The knowledge that threat deception technologies gather is invaluable for informing both security teams and other defining how outher security tools should operate. It is useful to look for a solution that facilitates the straightforward sharing of data and fits well within the existing security stack.
Deception technologies tend to be for endpoints, servers, network equipment, and traditional IT devices, but can also work with IoT devices like point-of-sale systems, medical devices, etc.
What Features Should You Look For In Threat Deception Platforms?
Threat deception platforms offer users a ‘low friction’ method of detecting potential threats and can complement other detection technologies. These best threat deception technologies should offer users the following features:
- Deception Technologies And Tactics. A good threat deception platform should offer users a way to create and manage decoy assets that can mimic real assets within the organization. The use of honeypots that simulate vulnerable systems work well to attract attackers, and so should be configurable and strategically placed throughout the network. By using false indicators like fake files, credentials, or network traffic, these tools can effectively mislead attackers and divert them from areas where they might do real harm.
- Alerting Mechanisms. These platforms should make use of behavior analytics to oversee interactions with these decoy assets. This allows them to quickly and efficiently identify any deviations from normal behavior patterns. They can then alert users to any potentially malicious activity. A robust alerting system that can promptly notify security teams of possible malicious activity – along with details on the nature of the deception and the attacks tactics – is very important for maintaining security.
- Automation And Orchestration. Any threat deception platform you consider should support automated responses to threats that are detected, which may include blocking malicious activities, isolating decoy assets, or initiating predefined incident response procedures. To ensure a cohesive response to detected threats, it is useful to automatically orchestrate actions across various security tools and systems.
- Continuous Monitoring And Dynamic Deception. This includes the ability to regularly modify and update the method of deception used, adapting them to evolving attacker techniques and tactics to make sure they remain effective. A threat deception platform should be continually capturing and analyzing forensic data related to any interactions with decoy assets. This can be used to provide valuable insights into the techniques attackers are employing and lead to improvements in the organization’s overall security defense.
