Implementation of cybersecurity honeypots

Honeypots in cybersecurity are decoy systems designed to simulate vulnerabilities or valuable resources to lure attackers. In this way, security teams capture and analyze their tactics without exposing the company’s real assets. This post explores the basics of honeypots.

Discover how honeypots can strengthen your cybersecurity strategy and catch attackers before they can do damage.

Cybersecurity honeypots must play a relevant role in an organization’s asset and application protection strategy. This cybersecurity deception technique enables CISOs and security managers to gain relevant information about emerging threats and allows them to improve incident response and fine-tune security policies.

Honeypots are one of the most widely used defensive cybersecurity tools by organizations because, in addition to allowing them to discover the tactics used by cybercriminals when launching and executing an attack, they do so without compromising the company’s network or data.

The use of honeypots allows the detection of malicious activities at an early stage, which makes it possible to provide a rapid response to malicious activities. security incident response and is also important in a performance digital forensics and malware analysisas well as within a cybersecurity auditby enabling security managers to identify potential entry points and vulnerabilities in their infrastructure.

Select a honeypot type

There are different types of honeypots, from low-interaction honeypots, which simulate services and applications and are typically used for early threat detection to collect basic information; to high-interaction honeypots, which mimic complete operating systems and provide more valuable information for the intrusion prevention and the improvement of the cyber threat management.

Selecting the right type of honeypot in cyber attack simulation is key to executing defense-in-depth strategies. Therefore, it is important to have clear objectives when implementing the honeypot. These may be aimed at cybersecurity risk analysis and malicious trafficthe improvement of the advanced network security o of the responses given to possible incidents, as well as the establishment of a policy of proactive IT security. Depending on the objectives to be achieved, one honeypot type or another should be chosen.

Isolation and control

In digital risk mitigation, the use of honeypots requires that they be completely isolated from the production environment. This is because by simulating vulnerable systems or services that can be easily exploited by a cybercriminal, if the honeypot is connected to the production network, there is a risk that the attacker can compromise it and, through it, gain access to other critical systems of the organization.

This arrangement also provides greater flexibility and control over their configuration, monitoring and management as CISOs can adapt them as needed and minimize any potential risk to the production network.

Monitoring and analysis

Cyber surveillance and monitoring are two essential elements in any enterprise cybersecurity strategy. Whether it’s catching hackers with honeypots or understanding their tactics, monitoring is critical to detect any suspicious activity. Continuous monitoring of honeypots will enable the establishment of a robust and adaptive cybersecurity posture and provide an additional layer of defense to the organization’s IT infrastructure.

Choosing a partner

Establishing intrusion detection systems (IDS) as honeypots is, therefore, one of the actions to be considered within a cybersecurity strategy, which must be adequately defined. For this, it is essential to have an experienced partner such as aggity, with a comprehensive proposal such as Cyber & Cloud by aggity, working in an integrated manner with the cybersecurity department to strengthen resilience against cyber threats in a digital environment that is constantly evolving.