Juniper Threat Labs Publishes New Methodology for Deception Honeypots

Researchers from Juniper Threat Labs have developed a new methodology for deception honeypots, and have published their detailed findings today:

FULL REPORT: HoneyProcs: Going Beyond Honeyfiles for Deception on Endpoints

Summary of findings:

Deploying detection solutions on an endpoint host comes with constraints – limited availability of CPU, memory, disk and other resources, stability constraints, policy adherence and restrictions, the need to be non-intrusive to the user, the host OS and other applications on the host.

In response to this, Juniper Threat Labs research presents HoneyProcs, a new deception methodology (patent pending) and an all user space method that extends existing deception honeypot technology on endpoint hosts. HoneyProcs complements existing deception technology by using forged, controlled decoy processes to catch info stealers, Banking Trojans, rootkits and other generic malware, and it does so by exploiting a common trait exhibited by these malwares – code injection.

By limiting its inspection footprint to only these decoy processes, HoneyProcs effectively addresses efficacy and performance concerns that otherwise constrain endpoint deployments.  Throughout this article, we further explain how the reduced and targeted inspection footprint can be leveraged to turn HoneyProcs into an intelligence gathering toolkit that can be used to write automated signatures for other antivirus and detection solutions to remediate infections on the system.