Enhancing Your Security Posture With Advanced Deception Technology Solutions

Enhancing Your Security Posture With Advanced Deception Technology Solutions

Almost all organizations, from mature security teams at large enterprises to lean SOCs at mid-market companies, can benefit from deploying deception technology. This technology detects threats early with high-fidelity alerts and reduces dwell time and incident response times.

Modern deception technology, augmented with threat intelligence, plants fake assets in your network that attackers want to peruse but can’t access. The resulting alerts provide actionable intel and stop lateral movement attacks.

Benefits

As threat detection tools have evolved, the security industry has begun to see a growing need for early threat detection. This is particularly true for enterprise-grade, highly sophisticated attackers, from advanced persistent threats (APTs) to industrial espionage groups and ransomware.

Deception technology aims to create false assets and traps within the network to lure and engage attackers in a safe environment where their actions can be monitored. This enables organizations to capture high-fidelity alerts and intelligence on their adversaries. This attack intelligence can then be used to improve overall defense strategies and level the playing field with attackers.

There are a lot of types of deception technology. Deception solutions can be deployed as an entire deception fabric or platform, as features within a broader platform, or as independent solutions. Some can be integrated with existing security infrastructure to allow for automated blocking, isolation, and response through repeatable playbooks that accelerate incident response. This native platform integration also enables attacker behavior to be shared across platforms, accelerating threat hunting and intelligence analysis.

The critical advantage of deception is that it helps to detect attackers in the early phases of a breach as they move laterally through the network. By engaging an attacker in a controlled environment, organizations can gain valuable insight into their attackers’ tools and tactics and their intention to steal data or compromise other systems. This intelligence can be used to quickly identify the most significant risks and prioritize investigation in the security operations center (SOC).

Costs

Deception is a low-cost way to bolster your security infrastructure and detect attackers when they breach your defenses. It can also dramatically reduce adversary dwell time by luring them away from tangible assets and into observable decoys, which enables you to track their progress and take preemptive action.

Modern deception technology solutions use concealment, misdirection, and disinformation to entice attackers from their known attack paths, detecting them before they reach production systems, data, credentials, and more. Unlike older technologies such as honeypots and honeytokens that can be easily seen by attackers and can cause false positives, these advanced detection capabilities rely on camouflage and deception to create realistic, targeted lures such as fake servers, drives, browser history, and even credential stores to confuse, misdirect and bait the attacker into wasting valuable time attacking worthless assets.

The information gathered by these deception technologies can be used to create threat intelligence for the security team or delivered as high-fidelity alerts to their security tools such as SIEMs, vulnerability scanners, firewalls, and other endpoint protection platforms. It can be delivered as an IOC (Incident of Compromise) or as MITRE ATT&CK data that is seamlessly integrated with existing tools to provide more context around what is happening inside the network.

For less mature organizations that can’t afford the overhead of a full deception deployment, they can use more limited deception techniques such as creating decoy Amazon S3 buckets incorporating their name to identify attempted reconnaissance or decoy login portals/webmail systems and VPNs to attract spear-phishing attacks. In this case, the cost of the deception solution is far outweighed by the savings in person-hours that can be freed up for tackling more sophisticated threats.

Implementation

With a proper strategy, implementing deception technology solutions in the Security Operations Center (SOC) is a relatively simple and low-risk process. This is particularly true for larger customers who deploy deception to augment existing threat detection, internal threat intelligence creation, and incident response capabilities.

For these customers, deception is a powerful tool that allows them to observe the actions of malicious actors while reducing their attack surface without compromising the natural systems they need to protect. In addition, they benefit from the threat intel gathered as attackers interact with deceptive assets and sift through false leads.

Unlike behavior-based systems that detect activity by establishing a normal baseline and classifying any deviation as an anomaly, deception sets a zero-activity normal baseline. It provides detailed IOCs on the attacker, including forensic artifacts. This allows defenders to focus on high-fidelity alerts that reduce dwell time and speed up incident response.

Deploying deception technologies can be challenging for smaller businesses because it typically requires a dedicated team of security analysts to break down and analyze the data. However, some vendors use machine learning and advanced heuristic processing to automate much of the deception generation, deployment, and analysis processes, allowing smaller organizations with limited resources to reap the benefits. Additionally, many small and mid-market CISOs can leverage deception as a service from vendors that offer analysis and protection as a subscription.

Operational

From a strategic perspective, deception technology flips the battleground between attacker and defender. By making it more difficult for an attack to be successful, defenders can gain concrete perspectives on what bad actors want and how they plan to get it. This can also help organizations build trust with stakeholders, such as customers and regulatory bodies, that they’re taking a proactive approach to data protection and security.

Unlike traditional anomaly detection and intrusion detection/prevention systems, deception tools provide a wide range of lures that emulate systems, assets, or vulnerabilities, making it easier for SOC teams to detect attacks. As the attacker interacts with these lures, they’re notified of an active threat engagement. This allows SOCs to quickly identify the attack, mitigate risks, and stop data loss.

Additionally, deception tools can be set up to alert analysts based on specific types of interactions (e.g., lateral movement, spear phishing) or specific activity patterns. This provides a more targeted and precise alert, eliminating the need to triage thousands of false positives.

Another appealing aspect of deception tools is that they’re relatively easy to deploy and manage. Most vendors offer simple solutions that are “set and forget,” meaning they can be deployed across the enterprise without disrupting network functions or requiring a significant amount of manual effort from security teams. This can free up valuable resources for addressing real threats. Moreover, deception technologies are designed to be self-configuring and automatically updated, reducing deployment and operational costs.

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