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Honeypot can be defined as a type of virtual trap to incite attackers. This trap intentionally lets criminals explore the vulnerabilities of the system. Honeypot lets users and systems understand the pattern of the attacker and helps understand the system’s loopholes. Everything is designed to give an appearance of vulnerability, making the attacker attack the system.
Type of Honeypot Deployment
There are mainly three types of honeypot employed by organizations. These include:
- Pure honeypots: This honeypot is an unsophisticated type of attack that lures an attack through bug taps.
- Low-interaction honeypots: This type lures criminal activities. They try to gather information related to botnets, malware, etc. from the attacker
- High-interaction honeypots: A very complex setup, it looks like a real infrastructure production. This prevents the attacker from gaining control of the actual system and hence, is a high maintenance system.
Uses of Honeypot
Honeypot has several uses, mainly luring attackers to a seemingly legitimate network. It also lets you understand the behavior of attackers. Spam traps are employed to attract spam traffic on emails.
Spam Trap: An Email Honeypot:
A spam trap is a fake email honeypot used to incite spam traffic on emails. They help identify spam users and hence keep your inbox safe. Some processes adopted by spam trap are as follows:
- Typos identification: The spam traps detect misspelled usernames and direct them to spam.
- Expired email account: Few users use expired email accounts for spam traps
- Buy email lists contain bogus email IDs that trigger the spam trap.
Utility of Honeypots:
The benefits of honeypots are as follows:
- It creates a mirage for criminals, hence, protecting the actual system. The more they are involved in the honeypot, the less they will target the original system.
- It tracks all criminal activities
- Provides you great visibility as it triggers spammers promptly.
- You can study the behavior of criminals and understand their working
- It helps collect the information of hackers
- They let you test the response capabilities of your firm
- It helps enhance your holistic security. As you are dealing with hackers, you understand ways to keep them at bay
- It is a cost-efficient and good investment
Honeynet
A honeynet is an amalgamation of 2 or more honeypots. It helps keep a tab of the attacker’s interaction with the resource. It helps understand the movement of the attackers at multiple places in one instance. If you have more destinations, you can efficiently convince attackers and understand their behavior.
Deception technology is a complicated process of using honeynet and honeypot. It also includes secure web gateways, firewalls, and IDSes.
Cyber threats are on the rise, and keeping organizations safe is the need of the hour. Although the honeypot is not the panacea, surely it is helpful.
