Best Practices for Building Honeypot Detectors

Honeypots are a critical piece of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. They help you understand existing threats to your business and can spot the emergence of new ones by luring attackers to a fake target. Different types of honeypots address a wide range of threats, from network attacks to malware infections. In this article, we’ll explore how to build a honeypot detector to help you identify and track malicious activity on your network.

A honeypot is a fake computer or server that lures attackers into revealing their attack strategies. Unlike firewalls or antivirus software, a honeypot doesn’t prevent an attack, but it does provide valuable intelligence about the tools and tactics used by hackers to access your sensitive data. There are many benefits to using honeypots, including their ability to divert attack traffic away from your business systems, detect and block attacks before they reach your real networks, and gather forensic and legal evidence without putting the rest of your system at risk.

Creating a honeypot is relatively simple. It can be set up on any system that has network access, from old computers to virtual machines. It doesn’t require specialized hardware, but it should have enough memory to hold an operating system and the ability to connect to a database. Most modern operating systems have built-in features that make it easy to create a honeypot, and there are countless open source solutions available.

There are also many different types of honeypots, ranging from low-interaction traps to high-interaction solutions that mimic real systems, networks and software applications. Low-interaction honeypots are easy to set up and typically only require basic simulated networking protocols and software services. These traps are useful for collecting information about an attacker’s level of engagement and location but aren’t able to gather in-depth intelligence on advanced or persistent threats.

High-interaction honeypots, on the other hand, are more complicated and difficult to break into. These traps offer a realistic experience that an attacker would encounter, such as a network with various servers and processes. They can be more challenging to break into, but once they do, they can yield valuable information about an attacker’s tools and tactics.

To help bolster your defenses, Varonis offers a Honeypot Detector that triggers custom real-time alerts whenever an attacker attempts to access your honeypot. This alert can quickly notify your Incident Response team so they can investigate the threat, potentially preventing the loss of sensitive data and further attack. By leveraging the DatAlert capabilities of the Varonis Security Platform, you can get the most out of your honeypots while improving overall visibility into your entire network. This tool is an important step towards fostering safer DeFi ecosystems and raising the bar on safety analytics.