Wondering what a honeypot trap is? Let’s understand what it is and its evolution from the historical to the modern digital world.
What is the Honeypot Trap?
Honeypot trap, also known as honey trapping, is basically a spying method. Honeypot locates and interacts with targets who possess valuable data. When engaging with the victim, the trap will give access to classified data. In ancient times, honey traps involved physical relationships, also called sexpionage; however, in the modern day, they divert into the cyberworld, called cyber honeypot.
Sexpionage: In the spying world, sex is basically a weapon, and it is used to seduce a target. Sexpionage is a classic honey trap practice that involves romantic or sexual relationships to conduct espionage actions to extract secrets.
Cyber Honeypot: The Cyber Honeypot trap technique uses a fake attack target to distract criminals away from authentic systems. This method can fake a variety of digital assets to improve their cybersecurity methods. The digital assets include software apps, servers, and even a whole network.
Honeypot Trap in History
Honeypot traps have a long historical basis, even though in the Bible you will see an example of a honeypot. The Bible refers to Delilah, a woman who is persuaded to determine the source of Samson’s ghostly strength and then hand over him to his enemies. The methodological practice of honey trapping or sexpionage arose in the 20th century. Here we have shared popular honeypot trap controversies from all over the world.
Betty Pack
Betty Pack’s actual name was Amy Elizabeth Thorpe. She seduced men to help the Allies win WWII. She was the daughter of a US Marine officer from Minnesota. She married a British ambassador, which led to a primer for MI6’s top brass. While in Warsaw, she learned the Polish were already cracking the Enigma codes, and she passed on info about how the machine was used.
Markus Wolf
In 1950, German spymaster Markus Wolf exploited the loneliness of single women. After World War II, he created a department for security service called “Romeo spies,” staffed with handsome and well-mannered men in Stasi. These men, known for their attractive appearance short haircuts, and sex-related activities, aimed to seduce powerful women and gain valuable intelligence. Their appearance makes Stasi penetrate West German industries, the government, and NATO to spot them. Wolf praised the Romeo spies as sharp workers who understood the potential of sex in business and espionage.
Maria Butina
Well, Maria Butina is a modern-day honeypot trap con and pleaded guilty to acting as a clandestine Russian agent in the US. She cozied up to the Donald Trump administration and the National Rifle Association to gather intelligence from traditional power brokers. Maria Butina supported her love of guns on social media and dated Republican Representative Paul Erickson. She was punished for 18 months in prison but served only five before she was expelled to Russia. Butina said that she had been doing all of this to ‘build peace’ between Washington and Moscow.
Modern-Day Honeypot Trapping
Honeypot trap in the modern day, also known as the Cyber Honeypot, is a cybersecurity mechanism. It is a manufactured attack target designed to divert cybercriminals from legitimate targets. They collect intelligence about the identity methods and motivations of the adversaries. The cyber honeypot distracts the cybercriminals from the actual target by investigating using their intrusion attempts to assess the adversary’s techniques, capabilities, and complexity. The intelligence gathered from the honey pot helps the organization to evolve and enhance its cyber security strategy and identify the blind spots in its existing architecture.
The law enforcement agencies use the honeypot trap techniques on the dark web. The honeypot techniques are combined with other cybersecurity tools for dark web monitoring and threat intelligence solutions. It allows administrations to detect threats at the beginning, secure sensitive data, and protect against a wide range of cyberattacks. Additionally, the dark web honeypot trap technique is used to catch the people who use the dark web world for illegal services like child sex, human experiments, live chat rooms, hiring hitmen, and others. The prime example of a honeypot trap in the dark web is the shutting of the Silk Road market, which is popular for illegal services.
Types of Cyber Honeypot Trap
A Honeypot Trap based on the design and deployment models. But at their core, honeypot decoys are designed to look like legitimate, vulnerable systems to attract threat actors. Here we have shared three types of cyber honeypot traps that let a threat actor execute various levels of malicious activity.
1: Pure Honeypot Trap
It includes a complete production system and monitors attacks via bug taps on links that connect honeypots to networks. This type of honeypot trap is known for being quite naive.
2: Low Interaction Honeypot
It reproduces services and systems that attract attention from threat actors. This method collects basic data about threats and their origins from blind attacks, including botnets and worms. The low-interaction honeypot is easy to set up and can be accomplished with basic simulated TCP and IP protocols and network services.
3: High Interaction Honeypot Trap
It is composed of more intricate setups that propose to act like a genuine production organization. This method does not restrict the threat actors’ activity level and offers extensive cybersecurity insights. It is designed to engage attackers for longer so researchers can trace where attackers go in the system to see sensitive data.
Sum Up
The spying method of the honeypot trap has been used since ancient times as a means of sexpionage. An agent uses their charm and allure to seduce another individual to pull out sensitive information or compromise them in some way. However, nowadays the cyber world has become very massive, and the honeypot technique has evolved and turned out to be digital. The cyber honeypot trapping techniques are mostly used by cybersecurity to catch the threat actors on the dark web and deep web.