Today's networks are undergoing all sorts of sinister attacks from numerous sources and for myriad reasons. Security at the perimeter is inadequate for thwarting today's highly intelligent attacks as hackers routinely breach the perimeter and gain entry. It isn't long before the network is compromised and critical information is stolen. We must now assume that, despite significant investments in prevention, breaches are going to happen. An additional approach is required. Security teams must go on the offensive, creating a web of non-stop, real-time detection operations using multiple vectors against an ever-changing landscape of cyber threats. Deception technology now plays a critical role. Used as a strategy for many centuries in actual warfare, the concept of deception is becoming a significant weapon in network-protection schemes. Deception technology doesn't rely on known attack patterns and monitoring. Instead, it employs very advanced luring techniques to entice attackers away from valuable company assets and into pre-set traps, thus revealing their presence. It is able to detect threats in real time without relying on any signatures, heuristics or complex behavioral patterns. But how effective is a deception strategy in detecting breaches? What method works best? How does it integrate with current security operations already in place?
In this talk we will present findings from a first ever research which measured the efficiency of proactive deception using mini-traps and decoys in real-life threat scenarios. We have reconstructed a real enterprise environment complete with endpoints, servers, network traffic and data repositories as well as security tools such as IDS, firewall, SIEM etc. The deception layer was then integrated into the environment in 2 steps: (a) by placing decoys in the network and (b) by placing mini-traps on the assets which point to the decoys, set false credentials, trigger silent alarms and more. We then evaluated the effectiveness of the mini-traps and decoys against both automated, machine-based attacks as well as against sophisticated human attacks: The first stage involved checking the behavior of a variety of malware families against the environment and measuring the deception layer's success in detecting their activity. For the second phase, we invited red-team professionals and white hat hackers to employ real techniques and advanced tools with the task of moving laterally in the environment and exfiltrate high value data.