Cyber deception strategies - Misdirection and obfuscation to confuse attackers
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08/05/2023 :: Jeremy Pickett :: Become a Patron :: Buy Me a Coffee (small tip) :: @jeremy_pickett :: Discussion (FB)
Proactively deceiving and derailing adversaries with traps and false trails.
TLDR: Cyber deception techniques like honeypots, breadcrumbs, and tarpits provide unique advantages for defenders by confusing and redirecting adversaries. Incident responders can leverage deception to gain intelligence on attackers early in intrusions and anticipate their next steps rather than purely reacting post-compromise.
However, deception involves inherent ethical risks if oversight is lacking. Security teams should ensure deception campaigns focus on asset protection, minimize falsehoods, and maintain transparency. Historically informed strategies must also translate thoughtfully to the digital domain. When applied judiciously with ethical foundations, deception flips the asymmetric advantage attackers typically enjoy by revealing their tools, tactics, and behavioral patterns to defenders. Integrating deception into incident response stacks enables more proactive anticipation of threats versus just response after incidents escalate.
Introduction
Introduction
Deception has been a cornerstone of defense throughout history - from Ancient Greek Trojan horses to D-Day military misdirection. Similarly, cyber deception proactively derails and confuses adversaries using traps, false trails, and misinformation. For incident responders, techniques like honeypots, breadcrumbs, and tarpits provide mechanisms to gain insight into threats, slow attacks, and improve detection.
This article will explore cyber deception strategies informed by military and intelligence practices. We’ll look at specific techniques for deployment, ethical considerations, and how deception integrates into incident response capabilities. While often associated with exploitation, applied ethically deception places defenders at an advantage versus attackers.
Historic Deception to Inform Cyber Strategies
Historic Deception to Inform Cyber Strategies
The use of deception, misdirection, and concealment to gain advantage over adversaries has deep historical roots. Many cyber deception techniques draw inspiration and lessons from centuries of military, intelligence, and security practices focused on misleading the enemy.
One of the earliest recorded examples is the legendary Trojan Horse ploy used by the Ancient Greeks to finally breach the city of Troy after years of fruitless siege. By hiding a force of soldiers within a giant hollow wooden horse statue, the Greeks were able to convince the Trojans to bring the supposed gift offering within their impenetrable walls. The Trojans' own greed and hubris in claiming the trophy allowed their defenses to be infiltrated from within. This demonstrates how attackers can sometimes be lured into traps by carefully crafting deception to align with their motivations and weaknesses.
During World War II, the Allies undertook elaborate campaigns of misinformation to disguise their D-Day invasion plans from Axis intelligence. Through double agents, fake radio chatter, and an entirely notional army assembled in England under General Patton, they convinced Germany the main invasion would strike Calais rather than Normandy. This masterful deception operation, known as Operation Fortitude, exemplifies the potential to comprehensively manipulate an adversary's perceptions of friendly forces, capabilities, and intentions to gain a decisive element of surprise.
The use of double agents, or assets pretending to work for an enemy while secretly loyal to their original side, became ubiquitous in intelligence tradecraft during the 20th century. When effectively handled, double agents provide a conduit for passing carefully selected information to adversaries that appears credible and useful but is ultimately incomplete, misleading, or useless for their operational objectives. The parallels to modern cyber deception are clear, where systems pretend to be vulnerable resources for attackers while really being instruments of observation and misdirection.
Physical deception tactics like camouflage, decoys, smoke screens, and other forms of obscuring real assets and activities have equivalents in the digital sphere. Various types of obfuscation to hide software behaviors and configurations, misdirection through false trails in data, virtual decoys to distract from genuine systems, and anti-surveillance measures all provide means to conceal the real and highlight the fake. Integrating these concepts from military doctrine into cyber operations inspired many new tools and techniques for deception.
By translating principles of denial, deception, misinformation, and misleading adversaries honed over centuries to the modern digital domain, cybersecurity experts established new models of deception. These methods aim to fatigue and frustrate attackers by presenting false leads and dead ends to investigative and intrusive activities, thereby denying them information and leverage. Well-executed cyber deception also eventually exposes threat actor capabilities and patterns when they interact with and attempt to counter the deception. Translating this goal of gaining advantage over intelligent adversaries by revealing their methods while concealing friendly techniques is at the core of cyber deception inspired by history.
Deploying Honeypots to Bait Attackers
Deploying Honeypots to Bait Attackers
Honeypots have become a potent cyber deception technique that provides valuable intelligence on adversary tradecraft by intentionally baiting attackers into engaging with vulnerable systems designed for observation. Honeypots divert real attacks away from production infrastructure and into isolated, closely monitored traps.
Honeypot Interactions
Honeypot Interactions
There are different types of honeypots optimized for different deception objectives. Low interaction honeypots only emulate limited application functionality through scripting and simple fake services, just enough to attract and detect malicious activity while minimizing the attack surface. These are easier to deploy securely but provide less insight since attacker activities are so confined.
High interaction honeypots involve deploying real operating systems and applications that attackers can fully access once compromised, allowing greater scope for monitoring their post-exploitation tradecraft. But the risks are higher as more elaborate honeypots have greater potential for adversaries to turn the tables if not painstakingly implemented with containment mechanisms.
Hybrid honeypots attempt to balance interactivity and control by integrating real systems with firewall rules, behavior monitoring, and other controls to increase flexibility without the full risks of high interaction environments.
The placement of honeypots in a network or application environment also requires careful strategizing. If their nature as decoys becomes too obvious, attackers may avoid them. But if too obscure, they may go unnoticed. Blending honeypots seamlessly into what appears to be the production attack surface is key.
Overall, well-managed honeypots implemented with the right level of interactivity and positioning provide extremely high fidelity observation of new tools, tactics, and procedures that attackers employ in the early stages of intrusions and reconnaissance. Catching these latest adversary innovations as they are deployed into the wild is extremely valuable intelligence that can rapidly inform detection rule tuning, threat hunting, mitigation development, and improvement of defenses across the environment. Honeypots, purpose-built to attract real attacks in an ethical manner, generate unique threat intelligence not attainable through other means.
Leaving Cyber Breadcrumbs to Detect Intruders
Leaving Cyber Breadcrumbs to Detect Intruders
The concept of leaving behind fake digital artifacts for attackers to discover and interact with, now known as breadcrumbs, emerged as an innovative cyber deception technique. Unlike honeypots which function as isolated traps, breadcrumbs are carefully placed false trails and decoys that are seeded across real production systems and information assets, intended to be stumbled upon by adversaries.
Once an attacker accesses or tampers with a planted breadcrumb, alerts are triggered that reveal the malicious activity and presence of the threat actor within systems. This parallels the fairy tale trail of breadcrumbs Hansel and Gretel left to find their way out of the forest. However, breadcrumbs are designed to intentionally lure attackers in rather than find a way out.
Breadcrumbs can take many forms to appear enticing and blend seamlessly into environments. Fake credentials left in databases, configuration files, or even application source code comments tempt attackers to try using them for lateral movement. Canary files planted on fileservers trigger alerts when opened or modified. Decoy web pages and documents look innocuous until interactions generate logs and hunting trails. Booby-trapped resources like certificates or SSH keys feed attackers misinformation while notifying defenders when stolen.
The art is placing breadcrumbs on systems and data flows that attackers are likely to pivot through in multistage intrusions, without being so obvious as to arouse suspicion. Unlike honeypots, successful deployment requires intimate knowledge of how real users and applications utilize the environment. Effectively sprinkled breadcrumbs act as tripwires across key assets and pathways to detect malicious activity post-compromise early, contain it quickly, and drive threat hunting.
Threat Hunting Gold Standard
Threat Hunting Gold Standard
Detection of multistage attacks through the use of canaries, poison pills, or misdirection is one of the most effective ways to detect lateral-moving attackers. The concept of, "No legitimate user should ever target this resource in this way" is a fundamentally high-value signal with a low chance of false positives.
Questions for Incident Handlers Engaging Deception Techniques
Questions for Incident Handlers Engaging Deception Techniques
1. What risks do honeypots introduce if compromised themselves?
1. What risks do honeypots introduce if compromised themselves?
Honeypots can create significant risk if they are compromised and used by attackers to expand their foothold in the environment. Highly interactive honeypots running real operating systems and applications have more attack surface and emulation gaps that could be exploited. For example, an SSH service on a honeypot server could have a buffer overflow vulnerability enabling remote code execution. Tight network segmentation using firewall rules, microsegmentation, VLANs, and other access controls is crucial to limit lateral movement if a honeypot is breached. Solutions like Synectics and T-Pot allow configuring in-depth containment mechanisms. Forensic monitoring and data capture techniques are also necessary to understand how attackers were able to identify the system as a decoy and circumvent defenses. Even low interaction honeypots carry some risk of exposing deception capabilities if improperly implemented.
2. How can we ensure deception code is rigorously separated from production systems?
2. How can we ensure deception code is rigorously separated from production systems?
Maintaining rigorous separation between deception code/infrastructure and production systems is critical for protecting production integrity and reducing potential unintended impacts if decoys are discovered or compromised. Dedicated segmented DeMilitarized Zones (DMZs), separate management interfaces, not reusing production accounts/keys, and physical separation of honeypot servers help isolate artifacts. Source code repositories should implement access controls, code review requirements, and rigorous branching to prevent any commingling of deception code with production code. Accounts used solely for administering deceptive infrastructure should have tightly scoped permissions isolated from production credential management and rotation. Dedicated deception management platforms like CYDEC, TrapX, and Illusive Networks facilitate strong separation versus ad hoc tooling.
Need to Know
Need to Know
Lastly, knowledge of deception systems must be on a need-to-know basis, and by definition and design is not appropriate for general knowledge or public disclosure. This includes but is not limited to expected IoCs, resources, signatures, keys, credentials, data order, and metadata. Consult with legal or counsel to ensure any plans involving deception are handled in a legal and ethical manner.
3. What false data would optimally distract attackers from real intellectual property?
3. What false data would optimally distract attackers from real intellectual property?
Generating compelling false data is essential for effectively distracting attackers from exfiltrating real intellectual property and trade secrets. The false information must credibly mirror expected formats, structure, naming conventions, logic flows, and content style to mimic legitimate proprietary data. Machine learning techniques like generative adversarial networks (GANs) can be leveraged to artificially generate false data that statistically matches patterns in real datasets without exposing actual information. For example, GANs could generate fake healthcare records, financial projections, or source code with similar veracity to real IPR. Solutions like TrapX and CyberCents specialize in crafting realistic fake artifacts. The goal is occupying adversaries with credible fakes long enough for detection without revealing any genuine crown jewels.
4. Where should deceptive breadcrumbs be placed to maximize detection?
4. Where should deceptive breadcrumbs be placed to maximize detection?
To maximize quickly detecting attackers, breadcrumbs should be strategically placed on key assets that intruders are likely to pivot to and access in progressive intrusion stages, such as databases, fileservers, domain controllers, and remote access gateways. Entry points like VPN concentrators and exposed applications are also useful locations to seed deceptive artifacts. Specifically, breadcrumbs can be inserted into webroot folders, configuration files, databases, and file shares that attackers would scour for credentials or data. martingale's Cloak product uses algorithms to automatically determine optimal crumb placement based on asset criticality, vulnerabilities, and threat intelligence. Focusing breadcrumbs on high-value resources and common pivot points allows responding rapidly to deception alerts before wider damage can occur.
This must be balanced with the risks of mistakenly revealing information, or mistakenly inducing an otherwise innocent bystander to trip the deception. Consult with legal counsel on appropriate plans and playbooks in the case an innocent user, through no fault of their own, is caught up in the deception.
5. How can we architect tarpits that minimize performance impact?
5. How can we architect tarpits that minimize performance impact?
The architecture of tarpits aims to slow and distract adversaries while minimizing performance degradation to legitimate production traffic. Network-based tarpits can use breakout gateways and traffic shaping technologies to selectively direct attack traffic to underpowered servers that intentionally respond slowly. Low priority pools of cloud infrastructure can also serve as tarpits with limited base resources. For application tarpits, deception functionality can be decoupled into separate microservices or virtual appliances that are only invoked upon alerts versus being embedded into core transactions. This isolates slower responses. Careful load testing and monitoring tunes tarpit latency and resource consumption to optimize both deception and real user experience. These measured approaches align with responders' goals of maintaining uptime while deceiving attackers.
These have included applications that can mimic the existence of network resources, such as responding to ARP requests for IP addresses that don't exist, instead of deploying actual hosts on those IP's. Simple scripts which will SELECT and answer arbitrary network connection attempts on arbitrary ports are a common and quick-to-develop deception technique.
6. What decoys and lures would our own Red Team find most enticing?
6. What decoys and lures would our own Red Team find most enticing?
Our Red Team's insights into typical attacker behaviors and motivations can inform crafting decoys and lures they would find highly enticing for deception programs. Red Teams can advise on wording, system vulnerabilities, credential formats, and file content that will distract and hook adversaries based on common intrusion patterns. For example, Red Team experience indicates adversaries often target backups like database dumps or configuration files. Fake versions containing compromised credentials can serve as highly tempting lures and early detection traps. This helps focus deception on what will work best versus theoretical use cases.
This comes back to the concept of Need to Know however. Red teams, by their nature, should not know the details of the defender's or blue teams deception systems. And divulging these systems to a 'friendly' red team may backfire spectacularly, and result in inconclusive results from the engagement.
7. How could an adversary detect and circumvent the deceptions?
7. How could an adversary detect and circumvent the deceptions?
Sophisticated attackers may eventually detect decoys through fingerprinting, monitoring for honeypot signatures, bait usage inconsistencies, or other counter-deception methods. Defenders must continually reassess decoys through red teaming to identify and address gaps. For example, honeypots may be fingerprinted through unusual TCP stack behavior or too perfect emulations. Breadcrumb artifacts can grow stale and unbelievable over time. Responders aim to continually improve deceptions and integrate with protections like network monitoring to detect circumvention attempts.
8. What legal risks or liabilities might deception impose?
8. What legal risks or liabilities might deception impose?
Deception programs can introduce legal risks if improperly scoped such as privacy violations through monitoring, intentional system outages, entrapment claims, or legal precedents limiting certain types of deception. Cross-functional collaboration with legal teams to continually assess legal exposure and develop appropriate guardrails is key. Solutions like layered approvals, limited use cases per legal guidance, exclusions like customer systems, and transparency help mitigate potential liability. This satisfies the responder’s goal of ensuring deception remains above board.
Projects like The Honeynet Project, Shodan, and internet scale scanning may present general guidance on legal risks. This should not be taken cavalierly or as tacit permission, but they may be used to inform opinions. Always educate and consult with experienced legal counsel, since a mistake or misfire can potentially carry severe legal repercussions (see the CFAA as an example).
9. How could we integrate deception to better enable threat hunting?
9. How could we integrate deception to better enable threat hunting?
Threat hunting can leverage deception by planting breadcrumbs on key assets to function as tripwires for hunts, creating false anomalies as haystacks for hunts to prioritize investigating, and integrating with threat intel to guide hunt hypothesis testing. For example, deception alerts on an asset could trigger threat hunts expanding from that pivot point using related hypotheses provided by the deception program. This mutually improves hunting efficacy and deception visibility.
A few examples of how this works in operating systems are called Stack Canaries, which alert the OS if 'spray and pray' attempts have been made against certain memory segments. Mislabeling function and method calls on purpose is also used in some versions of the Windows operating system, and ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) is a memory protection which uses deception to help prevent certain exploits.
10. What intelligence from deception would best inform defenses?
10. What intelligence from deception would best inform defenses?
High value intelligence includes attacker mechanisms for identifying decoys, bypassing defenses, toolsets and malware deployed, hands-on hacking techniques, targeting priorities based on systems engaged, and social engineering methods. This focuses on adversary strengths and weaknesses versus just alert data. Analyzing trends over time in how attackers interact with and respond to deception ultimately improves defenses and detection. Integrating this intel into security operations and capabilities helps responders continually advance incident response.
Intelligence gleaned from deception techniques can possibly be invaluable to eCrime and AntiFraud investigations, along with analysis taken by SOC analysts. As always, care must be taken to ensure the source of this intelligence and telemetry--the tools, techniques, procedures--are not disclosed except when there is a need to know.
11. What made famous military deceptions like the Trojan Horse so successful?
11. What made famous military deceptions like the Trojan Horse so successful?
The Trojan Horse succeeded through social engineering - appealing to opponent's greed and ego to smuggle forces inside seemingly as a prize. The creativity and understanding of human motivation were key. It also exploited the element of surprise, appearing outside expectations. Masterful execution completing the deception before discovery was also critical to success. These principals of human factors, creativity, concealment, and rapid execution make for effective cyber deception as well. These principles can be applied to many scenarios, be it giant wooden horses or network applications.
Out of band deception can also occur, as long as proper legal protections are put in place. Profiles on websites which are not immediately tied to an organizations defenses can be useful. One example could be releasing a set of credentials on the dark web which are invalid, but used to track their spread through previously unknown data sources or brokers.
12. How did WWII codebreakers manage ethical dilemmas from deception?
12. How did WWII codebreakers manage ethical dilemmas from deception?
WWII codebreakers had to balance harm from failing to act on intelligence with deliberately allowing some attacks to conceal codebreaking progress. Difficult trade-offs were made to sustain overall deception campaigns. Standards based on minimizing loss of life guided decisions, with oversight maintaining ethical grounding. The complexity of cyber deception ethics similarly requires sound governance and thoughtful cost-benefit analysis to justify deceptive actions.
The Enigma machine was widely used by the German military, and it's discovery and cracking by the Allies is a case study of the need to keep the public unaware of it's capture. The very knowledge that one of these machines and code books was obtained by Bletchley Park would have allowed the Germans to determine the leak, change their codes, and render the advantage moot or short lived.
13. What historic deceptions failed or were discovered prematurely? Why?
13. What historic deceptions failed or were discovered prematurely? Why?
The Confederate cavalry raid intended to draw Union forces from Gettysburg failed as a diversion when the main thrust was discovered too soon. Sloppy planning and execution rendered it ineffective. For cyber deception, poor scoping control, unsafe testing, lack of separation from production, and unconvincing lures can render operations obvious or detectable for attackers. Meticulous implementation overcomes historic pitfalls.
14. How did cyber deception emerge conceptually from older practices?
14. How did cyber deception emerge conceptually from older practices?
Military deception codified practices for camouflage, disguising intent, and delivering misinformation that inspired cyber deception approaches. Clandestine programs like safe houses and double agents executing sophisticated deceptions provided concrete models for emulation digitally. Classic deception maxims around hiding the real and showing the false underpin modern cyber techniques.
15. Which pioneers in cybersecurity originated major deception methods?
15. Which pioneers in cybersecurity originated major deception methods?
Early honeypot research like Cliff Stoll’s Alure Deception Toolkit in the 1990s pioneered tactical deception. Fred Cohen’s Deception ToolKit in the early 2000s expanded practical tooling. Commercial solutions emerged in the 2010s like Illusive Networks advancing automated deception. Academic research continues progressing the state of the art.
The book The Cuckoos Egg by Cliff Stoll is an excellent resource, along with a movie staring cliff describing the events. While the actual techniques are dated from a technology point of view, the human principles and aspects are timeless.
16. Is any deception unethical even if defenders’ motivations are good?
16. Is any deception unethical even if defenders’ motivations are good?
The ethics of deception are complex. Well-intentioned deception focused on defense rather than harm may still introduce risks of overreach, lack of transparency, or representing a slippery slope. Organizations should thoughtfully weigh these factors and implement strict oversight against potential ethical pitfalls. Some argue limited, proportional deception justified by intent can be ethical. Others contend any deception inherently erodes trust. There are reasonable positions on both sides.
In all cases, the value of the deception must be carefully weighed against the potential abuse. Deception results in a spectacularly high level of signal to noise, but given the context--if it is used by a regulated industry, a government entity, or violates contractural obligations--the opportunity for abuse is greater and the chance for negative repercussions increase significantly.
17. What safeguards prevent deception abuse or overreach?
17. What safeguards prevent deception abuse or overreach?
Safeguards like governance frameworks, transparency, scoped programs, and independent oversight help prevent abuse and overreach. Authorities for deceptive operations should be well-defined and delegated judiciously. Testing should occur in controlled environments to limit exposure. Code reviews and segmented infrastructure prevent unauthorized access. These guardrails reinforce ethical use and compliance.
18. How should we obtain informed consent for some types of deception?
18. How should we obtain informed consent for some types of deception?
For broader deception programs impacting customers or partner systems, informed consent may be warranted to preserve trust. This requires carefully tailored disclosure explaining program scope, data collection, oversight, and business justification. Legal teams can advise on appropriate consent mechanisms balancing transparency with secrecy where necessary. This consent upholds ethical obligations.
Many times attempting to access a system necessitates a warning notice that the system is for authorized use only. This is especially common on government computer systems, and is a common requirement for government contracts and technology. This does not mean it is only applicable to government systems, just that it is a common requirement in government.
19. Under what circumstances, if any, is more elaborate deception justified?
19. Under what circumstances, if any, is more elaborate deception justified?
More intricately deceptive operations tend to demand stronger justification based on criticality of assets, specificity of threat, and exhausting other options first. The benefits and risks warrant close examination before pursuing elaborate campaigns. However, imminent threat to life, critical infrastructure, or sensitive IP may warrant extensive deception as a last resort based on utilitarian ethics.
20. How can we ensure oversight and accountability for deception programs?
20. How can we ensure oversight and accountability for deception programs?
Combining senior leadership, legal, and ethical committees for oversight of deception programs, policies, and operations helps ensure proper accountability. Reviews of deception operations including justification, outcomes and collateral impact is necessary for learning and maturity. Such oversight is key to maintaining integrity as deceptive capabilities expand.
Ensnaring Attackers with Tar Pits and Time Sinks
Ensnaring Attackers with Tar Pits and Time Sinks
Tarpits emerged as a form of cyber deception that focuses on trapping and slowing down adversaries rather than just detecting attacks. Where honeypots aim to attract attackers into an isolated environment, and breadcrumbs intend to expose their presence, tarpits seek to intentionally frustrate and bog down malicious activities to a crawl once engaged.
The concept of tarpits draws upon the physical analogy of pits of tar that immobilize creatures unlucky enough to become trapped. Cyber tarpits similarly immobilize attackers by dramatically reducing their velocity, buying precious time for detection, and increasing the risk and costs of attacks.
Simple software tarpits work by artificially limiting the response speed of an application or service accessed by an attacker, introducing intentional delays. Rather than outright blocking activities like denial of service would, tarpits painfully slow actions, responses, and queries to a crawl that frustrates automation or wastes significant time of hands-on adversaries.
Server tarpits imitate real vulnerable applications and services attackers expect to leverage, but subtly limit outbound connections or data exfiltration speeds once engaged. This stealthily bottlenecks attacker command and control or data theft.
More elaborate tarpits utilize fake directories with nested looping structures and logic designed to consume endless time and computing resources from automated malicious scripts or defenders. Endless loops trap malware in a hopeless maze.
Documents and pages laden with dense, deep webs of excessive links and content can also distract and occupy attacker time as they attempt to sort real from deception.
Applied judiciously at chokepoints and layered into systems likely targeted for lateral movement or data theft, tarpits dramatically retard overall attack velocity. This expanded window for detection, response, and threat hunting before attackers reach their goals allows defenders to gain advantage. The wasted time and increased risk also deters continued pursuit. Tarpits turn attacker automation and momentum against them through deception.
TCP/resource depletion tarpit techniques
TCP/resource depletion tarpit techniques
TCP Window Size - Tarpits on Linux can use the iw command to set a tiny TCP receive window size (ex: 5 bytes) to throttle inbound connections to a crawl. Windows provides similar netsh command capabilities.
Retransmissions - Linux tcp_retries2 value can be tuned higher (default 15) via sysctl to prolong retransmit timeouts before acting. Windows TCPMaxDataRetransmissions does the same.
SYN Tokens - On Linux, syncookies kernel parameter enables SYN proxying to limit SYN-ACKs generated slowing TCP connection rates. Windows enables similar functionality through TCP Initial Congestion Window and SYN Attack Protect.
Partial Responses - Apache traffic shaping modules on Linux intelligently serve content in tiny fragments forcing slow partial reads. IIS URL Rewrite does the same on Windows.
High Latency - Linux traffic control (tc) and Network Delay Emulation tools introduce configurable delays into network flows, hampering attackers. Windows psping measures effects.
Computation - ModSecurity and proof-of-work addons introduce computational challenges like hashcash solving before Apache will fully respond on Linux. Cloudflare Bot Mitigation does similar for Windows web servers.
Carefully integrating these capabilities into Linux or Windows servers allows precisely throttling TCP and application performance for clients based on threat and risk attributes. Abusing these protocols and intentionally introducing latency deters high-volume automated attacks by forcing them to run at a costly crawl.
Ensuring Ethical Motivations for Cyber Deception
Ensuring Ethical Motivations for Cyber Deception
Given that deception inherently involves some level of duplicity and falsehood, ensuring cyber deception is applied ethically and legally is imperative for information security teams. Before planning and executing any deception campaigns, security professionals should carefully consider key ethical questions:
Firstly, they should examine if the fundamental intent is defense rather than exploiting systems for financial gain or sabotage. Ethical deception focuses on protecting customers, data, systems, and infrastructure through distraction, confusion, and wasting attacker time. Technical controls like honeypots should aim to generate threat intelligence to bolster defenses rather than enable access to production systems.
Secondly, could the specific technical steps enable adversary objectives or expose additional risks if discovered? Failed or improper implementations of deception tools may inadvertently aid sophisticated attackers, for example flawed honeypot containers granting access to wider networks. Threat modeling deception campaigns is vital to avoid unintended consequences.
Additionally, is oversight in place to guarantee legal and ethical use? Governance controls via committees performing risk/benefit analysis, authorizing deception operations, and reviewing outcomes based on security policies can act as checks and balances against overreach or abuse. Technical controls like logging, user access controls, and authorization also support ethical oversight.
Furthermore, are tools narrowly scoped with the minimum falsehood required to achieve goals? Precision deception focused only on observing and confusing adversaries helps mitigate unnecessary collateral damage from overly broad campaigns. Techniques like virtualized sandboxed honeypots, gateway honeyports, and fake user accounts follow precision principles.
Finally, will the deception campaign ultimately improve overall security and safety significantly more than potentially diminish customer trust if discovered? Meticulous deception operations executed ethically for protecting critical systems and data likely justify the means, but organizations must weigh short term gains and long term trust impacts.
With ethically sound motivations, stringent oversight, controlled implementations, and narrow scoping, cyber deception can be an effective technique for defenders. But absence of safeguards risks undermining security through adversarial counter-deception and loss of customer trust in stewardship of their data and systems.
Auditing Real-World Containers
Auditing Real-World Containers
Auditing production container security configurations requires combining static inspection of image registries and runtime hosts with dynamic analysis of running containers.
Registry scanning tools like Anchore and Trivy validate production images for known vulnerabilities. Runtime tools like Falco and Sysdig monitor production container activities at scale. Compliance checks assess security controls like network rules, resource limits, and runtime privilege levels.
This is a critical process for container security, and should not be trivialized. As explored by previous questions and examples, this is a straightforward way of establishing baselines and detecting vulnerabilities.
Auditors also directly inspect production hosts for misconfigurations, monitor traffic between containers, and check volumes, secrets management, logging, and administrative access controls.
Taken together, static scanning, behavioral monitoring, configuration validation, and direct inspection of running production systems provides comprehensive auditing of real-world container deployments. The goal is ensuring security controls align with policies.
Integrating Deception Into Incident Response
Integrating Deception Into Incident Response
Incident responders can significantly augment their detection, intelligence gathering, and containment capabilities by strategically integrating deception techniques into their information security stacks. Used ethically, deception provides unique advantages for defenders seeking to gain leverage over sophisticated adversaries.
Honeypots, carefully deployed alongside production systems, serve as isolated and closely monitored traps that attract and redirect real attackers away from critical assets. This provides responders invaluable collection opportunities to observe latest attacker behaviors and tradecraft for response planning purposes.
Breadcrumbs seeded across key databases, fileservers, and other resources act as landmine tripwires to provide early warnings of compromise for rapid investigation. The triggered alerts allow swift containment before breaches expand their foothold.
Tarpits embedded into lower priority applications and services safely slow down and distract adversary activities once engaged, enabling improved discovery and response before attackers reach their objectives.
Analyzing how attackers interact with and attempt to counter deceptions also provides unique insights into adversary goals, tools, infrastructure, and thought patterns that inform prevention. Defenders gain an asymmetric view into the enemy.
Responders can also leverage deception to support targeted disinformation campaigns by feeding attackers fake credentials, data, or system access to confuse and misdirect their efforts.
By proactively integrating deception into defenses, incident responders can anticipate and redirect attackers’ next steps early in intrusions rather than purely reacting after compromises escalate. Deception flips the asymmetric advantage that human adversaries typically enjoy over defenders in cyber conflicts by revealing their tradecraft. When thoughtfully applied, deception provides defenders a potent capability for gaining leverage over intruders.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Cyber deception borrows age-old concepts of military denial and deception aimed at misleading and defeating enemies. Techniques like honeypots, breadcrumbs, and tarpits translated thoughtfully to the digital domain provide incident responders proactive means to detect, monitor, and counter focused threats.
With ethical implementation and oversight, deception campaigns can improve enterprise resilience without compromising integrity. Just as fabled Trojan horses and WWII misdirection reshaped key battles, creatively applied cyber deception today alters the balance between attackers and defenders through guile, cunning, and a touch of trickery. Deception remains a valid and practical capability for responders when applied judiciously.
This article covered cyber deception's historical foundations, specific techniques for deployment, ethical considerations, and integration with incident response. Readers are encouraged to explore deception's advantages for enhancing enterprise defense and turning the tables on adversaries. Deception may open unorthodox and unconventional opportunities for responders seeking every edge against attackers.
References
References
1. Wikipedia: "Honeypot (computing)"[1]
- This article provides an overview of honeypots in computer security, including their purpose, types, and design criteria.
2. Dissertation: "Deception Techniques Using Honeypots"[2]
- This dissertation explores deception techniques using honeypots and provides valuable information on the topic of security.
3. ArXiv: "Three Decades of Deception Techniques in Active Cyber ..."[3]
- This paper presents a systematic review of defensive deception techniques, including honeypots, honeytokens, and moving target defense, to build a holistic and resilient deception-based defense.
4. ScienceDirect: "Three decades of deception techniques in active cyber ..."[4]
- This paper reviews representative techniques in honeypots, honeytokens, and moving target defense, spanning from the late 1980s to the year 2021.
5. PubMed Central: "Containerized cloud-based honeypot deception for ..."[5]
- This article discusses the use of containerized cloud-based honeypots for improving intrusion detection mechanisms and incident response in handling and mitigating cyber attacks.
6. ACM Digital Library: "Deception Techniques in Computer Security: A Research ..."[6]
- This research paper explores the use of deception techniques in achieving proactive attack detection and prevention in computer security.
These references provide a comprehensive understanding of honeypots, tarpits, and deception techniques in information security, covering topics such as their purpose, types, implementation, and benefits.
Citations:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_(computing)
[2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?doi=9a042eba386a4f0eb60dcdf3d7822c11b8a0fa0d&repid=rep1&type=pdf
[3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.03594.pdf
[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167404821001127
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9876893/
[6] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3214305
References and Citations by Perplexity.ai
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