Honeypots and Deception Technology

What Are Honeypots?

A honeypot is a deliberately vulnerable system designed to attract and detect attackers. Since honeypots serve no legitimate business purpose, any interaction with them is suspicious by definition. This makes them highly effective detection tools with near-zero false positive rates.

Honeypots serve two purposes: detection (alerting you to attackers in your network) and intelligence (studying attacker techniques, tools, and procedures).

Types of Honeypots

Low-interaction honeypots emulate services at a basic level. They are easy to deploy and maintain but provide limited intelligence:

• Honeyd — Simulates multiple virtual hosts with different OS fingerprints
• Dionaea — Emulates vulnerable services to capture malware samples
• Cowrie — SSH/Telnet honeypot that logs brute-force attempts and shell commands

High-interaction honeypots are full systems with real operating systems and applications. They provide deep intelligence but require significant maintenance and carry risk if the attacker pivots to production systems.

Deployment Strategy

Place honeypots strategically:

• DMZ — Detect external scanning and exploitation attempts
• Internal network — Detect lateral movement after initial compromise
• Server segments — Deploy fake database servers or admin panels
• Cloud — Fake S3 buckets, API endpoints, or credential stores

Modern Deception Platforms

Enterprise deception platforms deploy thousands of breadcrumbs (fake credentials, files, and network shares) alongside honeypots. When an attacker interacts with any deception artifact, the platform alerts security teams with high-confidence detections.

The key advantage of deception is that legitimate users never interact with these systems, so every alert represents real malicious or unauthorized activity.