Honeypot techniques are used to lure cyber attackers into spaces where they can be tracked without doing harm. (Credit: Theresa Thompson (CC BY 2.0)
ALBUQUERQUE: A new investment by the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley outpost gives the military new tech to catch and stop insider threats on compromised networks. Announced January 25, the Defense Innovation Unit awarded an Other Transaction agreement to CounterCraft to detect and provide intelligence on cyber threats. DIU has already prototyped CounterCraft’s platform.
In 2016, NATO set out to incorporate honeypots into its defensive posture. In November 2020, NATO experimented with CounterCraft’s platform as a way to lure and red team identify hackers, and found the platform successful.
The technology, the Cyber Deception Platform, creates a trap for hostile actors, encouraging them to reveal their techniques, tools, and command structure once that have already breached a network.
“They’re essentially honeypots and honeynets,” said Amyn Gilani, CounterCraft’s Chief Growth Officer, referring to the cybersecurity techniques of making an enticing trap (honeypots) and linking those traps together (honeynets).
Honeypots themselves are an old technique. Famously, honeypots were used to detect the 2017 WannaCry attack. CounterCraft’s offering is designed to find more active intrusion, and then to convince the attackers into revealing all the tools they have before they realize they are in a virtual decoy.
“What we’re doing here is making an environment look really interesting. We’re putting real endpoint detection services on endpoints, making it look like a real environment,” said Gilani. “It’s interactive in a way — we’re putting breadcrumbs as well, along this honeynet network, so the th ..
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