The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released new guidance on deploying decoy systems for robust cyber defenses within critical infrastructure organizations.
Cyber decoys, the agency says, complement Zero Trust models, which continuously verify all access, by assuming an adversary has gained some level of access to an enterprise environment.
“Cyber decoys are assets that appear to be legitimate systems, accounts, or data, but are designed to distract adversaries, detect their presence, or facilitate collection of cyber threat intelligence (CTI),” CISA notes.
They enable organizations to identify, observe, and block malicious activity early, gather and analyze CTI, and allocate resources more effectively.
“Decoy techniques are incremental, cost-effective, and scalable, allowing organizations to introduce them without major architectural changes,” CISA’s guidance (PDF) reads.
To expose adversary activity, organizations should place decoys where users rarely or never interact with them, and should configure them to produce high-fidelity alerts.
They should be designed to divert attackers to decoy data, to produce a misleading understanding of the environment during adversary reconnaissance, and lure threat actors into downloading large amounts of non-sensitive or meaningless data.
Additionally, they should direct adversaries to controlled environments where their real-world-like operations can be observed, and CTI can be collected more efficiently.
Effectively deploying these systems, including lures, tripwires, decoy artifacts, honeytokens, and honeypots, is a three-phase operational process involving preparation, execution, and understanding.
During the preparation phase, organizations must evaluate their threat landscape, set clear operational goals, map out desired adversary perceptions and reactions, establish deployment channels, and define success metrics.
Following execution, organizations need to turn data into actionable intelligence and feedback intelligence, and to analyze successes and failures for improvement.
CISA’s guidance details the benefits of each type of decoy system and how decoys should be deployed, and provides example scenarios for a better understanding of decoy techniques.
“CISA developed this guidance to help defensive teams at varying levels of cybersecurity maturity plan and implement cyber decoy strategies that strengthen their detection and response capabilities. Many organizations struggle to detect adversaries who use legitimate credentials, native tools, and living off the land (LOTL) techniques to conduct discovery, move laterally, and access data,” CISA notes.
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