The Defense Innovation Unit is investing in a cybersecurity platform that not only gathers threat intelligence but uses deception tactics to better understand adversaries seeking to penetrate networks.
DIU awarded cybersecurity firm CounterCraft, a European startup that recently expanded into the U.S., a prototype other transaction agreement, according to a Monday press release. Though CounterCraft’s work with DIU predates the discovery of the massive SolarWinds attack, Dan Brett, one of the company’s founders, told Nextgov in a recent interview CounterCraft’s platform is built to force adversaries into making the kind of errors that led to the discovery of the SolarWinds hack.
The compromise of the SolarWinds Orion software was discovered after what Brett called a “mistake” on the part of the attackers, whom the federal government’s Cyber Unified Coordination Group said are likely Russian hackers. The incident that eventually led to the discovery of the massive hack campaign affecting multiple federal agencies came when another cybersecurity firm, FireEye, noticed a new device being registered for two-factor authentication.
“We're going to make it easier for adversaries to make mistakes and get picked up,” Brett said. CounterCraft’s Cyber Deception Platform exists to force adversaries into making these kinds of mistakes, Brett explained, using fake environments meant to catch would-be attackers. These parallel IT environments then allow CounterCraft to monitor how adversaries behave in order to generate machine-readable threat intelligence to be shared—covertly, so as not to tip off attackers—in real time.
“Because we've got these threat actors not in a real IT system, they’re in something that was deliberately deployed to pick up bad people, we can change t ..
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