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Magicians use theatrics to divert their audiences’ attention away from the real trick, essentially deceiving us. This fascinating concept is becoming a strategy applied in the field of cybersecurity. As a concept that has been utilised within the intelligence and defence communities for many years, the idea of tricking someone into thinking that they are in full control of the situation, only to realise much later that they never were, is effective for many organisations. With this in mind, let’s meet the new face of cyber security - deception technology.
Organisations can stay ahead of hackers seeking to steal valuable data by adapting deception technology, which enables enterprises to detect perpetrators as soon as they break into your network and stop them from inflicting any damage. The system then feeds the attackers with misinformation that leads them to believe they’re gaining what they want.
As a modern development of traditional “honeypot” security techniques, which typically leverage on an individual’s legitimate-seeming data file in the hope it would attract malicious actors, today’s deception technologies are far more layered, robust and automated. Just like a magician with a bag of tricks, organisations can use deception technology to misdirect the perpetrator, delaying them from going deeper into the network and fulfilling their malicious intent.
What can we learn from our attackers?
Applying deception technology is one of the most resourceful ways to future proof systems. In addition, it serves several important goals. First, it protects data and systems. Second, it slows down attackers to give businesses time to try to understand their motivation and goals. Third, it buys organisations’ time to find out how they gained access, and last but not least, it gives business an opportunity to capture logs and breach data for an incident-response team to review.
With the news of data breaches a regular occurrence, including deception technology as part of security measures equips organisations with a multi-pronged approach to impeding attacks. This allows an opportunity to monitor attacks, learn about behaviours, techniques and provides fast and efficient handling of any issue helping to fortify defences against future threats.
Deception technology as a mainstream security tool
Despite the fact that deception technology remains a leading-edge technology, recommended for highly mature security teams in high-risk industries, experts are seeing a steady incline of organisations actioning deception technology as means of protection. According to a recent survey, deception technology will become a $2.1 billion global market by 2021.
In order for deception technology to be truly effective, companies need to combine it with traditional protective measures to deliver a powerful deterrent to attackers. Against an ever-changing landscape of cyber threats, organisations must continue to stay ahead of the their attackers, with multiple levels of security, a highly engaged and educated team, all of which will limit the damage and ensure they are better protected to take on threats of any kind