How Can Honeypots Help Cybersecurity?

Designed by cybersecurity experts, honeypots are digital assets meant to support companies in keeping their security.These assets are designed in a way that makes them appealing to hackers, who are then tracked as they attempt to access them. Once they have gained access, they are monitored as they seek to exploit the asset, providing cybersecurity specialists with priceless insight into the tactics hackers use to exploit such assets.

What is Honeypot？

A honeypot is a computer system used in cybersecurity to capture an attacker in the same way that honeypots do for insects. This is a susceptible computer system that defends an organization's key systems by impersonating the target of a hacker attack and diverting their focus.By regularly detecting, monitoring, and evaluating these attackers' behavior in the honeypot, security experts can successfully obtain information about cybercriminals' IP addresses as well as the strategies and types of assaults they employ.This allows them to increase network security for the organization's systems.Furthermore, it helps cybersecurity researchers analyze and investigate the numerous attack types used by hackers, allowing for the creation of more effective defense tactics.

How honeypots work?

A honeypot is not intended to fix a specific issue, such as a firewall or anti-virus software. Instead, it is used as an informational tool by system security teams to provide insight and enable the detection of potential system dangers. It's a trap used to entrap attackers. Its working principle can be divided into two parts:

• Entrapment using fake data

  In some cases, additional information is included that appears to be sensitive data, in order to encourage hackers to gain access and steal it. After luring the hackers into the trap of phony data, network security specialists can reverse the infiltration into their systems. This will help to improve the organization's Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and prepare for similar attacks in the future.

• Deliberate Security Vulnerabilities

  It is inevitable that hackers will attempt to exploit any vulnerabilities they find in an organisation's systems. By taking advantage of this, developers create security holes by intentionally creating vulnerable ports, such as ports that respond to port scanning or weak passwords. These ports are then connected to a honeypot environment. This allows attackers to enter the system through these ports in an attempt to cause serious damage. However, they are lured into setting up a honeypot instead of a secure implementation of the network system.

Types of Honeypots

Honeypots aim to imitate a target system in order to divert potential hackers away from valuable, real-world systems. Despite their simplicity, honeypots can be built in a variety of ways to meet different needs.

1. According to the deployment approach

• Production Honeypots
  

  These are used to detect risks within an organization's internal network. They are typically deployed alongside servers in the production network. This type of honeypot generally contains some fake information as a disincentive to attackers, allowing administrators to find and address flaws in the actual system before the attacker gains access.

• Research honeypots

  These are used for investigative purposes. In comparison, research honeypots offer greater versatility. Network security experts utilize these honeypots to gather and analyse attacker behavior, enabling the deployment of countermeasures in a timely manner.

2. According to the level of sophistication:

• Pure Honeypots

  These honeypots run complete systems on a variety of servers that are fully configured to mirror a production environment. It will store data and information that could be considered secret or sensitive, and they are outfitted with several sensors to track and observe attacker activity.

• Low-interaction honeypots

  These honeypots are meant to have little interaction with potential attackers. They employ fewer resources and are primarily used to acquire basic information about the nature and source of the threat.The configuration is basic, utilizing TCP/IP and web services.However, the content is insufficiently compelling to hold an attacker's attention for an extended period.

• Mid-interaction honeypots

  These honeypots mimic elements of the application layer but do not have an operating system. Their purpose is to confuse attackers or delay their actions, buying the organisation more time to respond to the attack.

• High-interaction Honeypots

  These honeypots are intended to keep an attacker involved in the honeypot for as long as feasible.It helps security experts better grasp the attacker's goals and intents, making it easier to spot potential system flaws. High-interaction honeypots may include additional systems, databases, and procedures that allow researchers to watch how an attacker searches information, what data they like, and how they attempt to gain access, offering significant insight into their behavior.

3. Other types of honeypots

• Malware honeypots

  These honeypots emulate software applications and APIs in order to induce malware attacks. By analysing these attacks, anti-malware measures can be developed or API vulnerabilities can be fixed, thus improving the security of the system.

• Spam honeypots

  Fake email addresses are placed in locations that are not readily apparent to the human eye, but can be identified by automated address collectors. As these addresses are solely intended for spam traps, any emails sent to them are automatically classified as spam. Any emails deemed to be similar are automatically blocked, and the sender's IP address is blacklisted.

• Database honeypots

  The creation of decoy databases allows for the monitoring of software vulnerabilities and the discovery of attacks that exploit insecure system architectures or utilize SQL injection, SQL service exploits or privilege abuses.

• Client Honeypots

  Client honeypots are designed to entice attackers to compromise a client system using a malicious server. They masquerade as clients and observe how the attacker modifies the server during the attack. These are typically run in virtualization environments with containment measures in place to mitigate the risk to researchers.

• Spider honeypots

  Spider honeypots are used to capture web crawlers by creating web pages and links that are accessible only to crawlers. Identifying these crawlers enables us to develop strategies for preventing malicious bots and advertising web crawlers.

• Honeynet

  A honeynet is a system that consists of multiple honeypots used to study various types of attacks, such as DDoS attacks, attacks against CDNs, or ransomware attacks. The honeynet monitors all traffic (both inbound and outbound) to protect the rest of the organisation's systems.

Advantages of using Honeypot

Network security personnel can effectively improve the network security of a system by using honeypots wisely and correctly:

• Simple and Efficient
  

  Honeypots are not only easy to deploy, but they are also an efficient tool for providing alerts and information to administrators about attacker behavior. By deploying it in advance and waiting for an attacker to take the bait, it can still be effective without the need for constant monitoring or information about known threats.

• Stalling the attack process:

  Hackers are constantly scanning and looking for vulnerabilities in your system, honeypots can interact with them as they roam around, and once detected, administrators can trap the attackers and analyse their attack behaviors thus disrupting the attack chain. And honeypots can also confuse attackers, making them focus on irrelevant and false information rather than actual sensitive information.

• A great security training tool:

  Honeypots allow you to test your security team's ability and responsiveness to system threats, so you can identify problems and make improvements early.

• Optimize and enhance network security:

  Honeypots generate fewer false positives than traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS). By correlating the data collected by honeypots with other system and firewall logs, more relevant alerts can be configured for the IDS, resulting in fewer false alarms. As a result, honeypots can help optimize and enhance the performance of other network security systems.

• Low Hardware Requirements:

  Honeypots do not take up a lot of system resources because they can handle a limited amount of traffic. And organisations don't need to buy new equipment, they can use old computers that are obsolete and no longer in use to set up honeypots, which saves money.

• Defend against internal threats:

  Don't forget that there can be threats within the organisation, such as employees stealing confidential documents before they leave. While firewalls can't stop this threat, honeypots can effectively counter it and reveal problems such as insiders taking advantage of vulnerabilities in system privileges.

Limitation of using Honeypots

Honeypots have the limitation that they can only detect specific attacks against them and cannot monitor all activities comprehensively. Furthermore, not all hackers will be deterred by honeypots. Once they become aware of their existence, they may exploit them to mislead you into believing that they are trapped, thereby distracting you and allowing them to launch attacks on the actual system, which could cause even more damage. It is also important to note that, unlike other detection systems such as firewalls, honeypots can only be used as part of a network security strategy and need to be used in conjunction with other security measures. Otherwise, in the worst case scenario, they could be used by attackers as an entry point into the system.

Conclusion

The benefits of honeypotting can be said to outweigh the drawbacks. As part of a cybersecurity strategy, honeypots should be used in conjunction with other forms of protection. ForeNova Security is the leading cybersecurity service that not only helps organisations augment their existing Security Operations Teams (SecOps), but also provides a complete range of 24/7 monitoring and response, threat intelligence and other cyber defense tools for your organisation.

Contact us to discuss your cybersecurity services requirements.