CISA urges organizations to deploy honeypots and cyber decoys to catch hackers

In a new security advisory, CISA said many organizations struggle to detect adversaries who use legitimate credentials, native tools, and living-off-the-land techniques to conduct discovery, move laterally, and access data. “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,” CISA said. The agency added that as organizations adopt Zero Trust models, they should assume a malicious threat actor may gain some level of access to their environment and plan accordingly.

CISA’s advisory presents Zero Trust as the preferred way to secure corporate infrastructure. Zero Trust treats no user, device, or network segment as inherently trustworthy and requires organizations to operate on the assumption that compromise is inevitable, according to the guidance. Cyber decoys are consistent with that model and complement Zero Trust by supporting continuous monitoring and verification, creating high-fidelity alerts for suspicious activity, reducing alert fatigue, and helping defenders detect post-compromise activity such as adversary living-off-the-land techniques, CISA said.

The guidance says decoys are incremental, cost-effective, and scalable, and can be introduced into the cybersecurity technology stack without major architectural changes. It introduces decoy concepts such as tripwires, breadcrumbs, and honeytokens. It also uses the MITRE Engage and MITRE ATT&CK frameworks to provide the steps needed to plan, implement, and refine these operations, according to TechRadar.

TechRadar reported that the guidance is available as a PDF. CISA’s recommendations are aimed at helping organizations of varying sizes and cybersecurity maturity levels adopt decoy strategies, the report said.