Deception Fundamentals: The Missing Piece in Your Security Strategy

Modern attackers are using deception against you right now. They're masquerading as legitimate users, exploiting your trust in familiar tools, and moving through your environment undetected. Meanwhile, your deception defenses are so obvious that skilled adversaries spot them immediately and actively avoid them.

After years of red teaming, we've learned that most security teams treat deception like any other security tool - deploy it and hope it works. Deception vendors prioritize ease of deployment over understanding the attacker mindset that determines whether deception will actually be effective.

The Evolution Gap

Today's Attackers

• Skip the noisy network scans
• Browse internal resources like legitimate employees
• Master your approved tools and workflows
• Blend seamlessly with authorized behavior

Our Security Tools

• Hunt for "evil" behaviors that skilled attackers avoid
• Generate alert fatigue from systems that can't distinguish threats from users
• Require months of UEBA baselining with zero immediate value

How Adversaries Leverage Deception

The irony? Attackers already weaponize deception brilliantly. They understand principles we've forgotten in our defensive strategies.

Case Study: GitHub Device Code Phishing

Recent Praetorian research demonstrates how attackers exploit trust:

1. Abuse legitimate OAuth2 flows - Request standard scopes like user, repo, and workflow
2. Leverage trusted infrastructure - Create GitHub Pages sites (<username>.github.io, e.g. devicesync.github.io) that look official
3. Exploit psychological shortcuts - Users see "github.io" and immediately trust

Other Sophisticated Techniques

Attackers consistently turn legitimate processes against unsuspecting employees:

• DLL Sideloading: Exploit signed applications to load malicious libraries
• Helpdesk Vishing: Impersonate employees convincingly enough that support bypasses controls
• SaaS Abuse: Use legitimate services to create fake resources that establish instant rapport

From my red teaming days: we succeeded by leveraging trusted infrastructure and familiar workflows that exploit cognitive shortcuts rather than technical vulnerabilities. Security is people, processes, and technology - in that order.

The Fundamental Formula

Effective deception follows a simple formula that's remained constant since ancient warfare:

Deception Assets + Communication Channels = Desired Effect

But here's what most teams miss: both components must be rooted in deep PATTERN analysis of your REAL assets and communication methods. You can't fake what you don't understand.

Most teams excel at building fake assets but completely fail at controlling how attackers discover them. That's why existing deception technology identify low-skilled/script kiddies while skilled adversaries avoid interacting with these resources!

Understanding Desired Effects

Before deploying anything, define exactly what you're trying to achieve:

• Detection: Not just "attacker present" but where they are and what they want
• Deterrence: Make attackers question every discovery
• Distraction: Draw attention from crown jewels
• Delay: Force methodical validation that extends dwell time
• Perception Management: Fundamentally alter how attackers view your environment

Why Most Deception Operations Will Fail

If your fake assets don't match expected patterns in your specific environment, they're worse than useless - they're counterproductive.

The Indicator of Canary research shows how vulnerable current implementations are. Attackers now:

• Systematically identify honey token artifacts across file formats
• Examine suspicious files in offline environments first
• Maintain shared intelligence about deception signatures
• Actively scan for and avoid known patterns

We've explored implementation issues of AWS Honey Tokens where vendors create tokens that can be easily identified by attackers, with detection timing that's incorrect and slow - sometimes delayed by hours!

The Missing Foundation

Effective deception requires deep analysis of your actual infrastructure. You must understand the PATTERNS of your REAL assets before you can create believable fakes.

Document your reality:

• How does your org actually name resources?
• When and how are legitimate assets accessed?
• What metadata patterns exist consistently?
• How do genuine resources integrate with other systems?

This pattern analysis serves two critical purposes:

1. Asset Design: Creating deceptions that mirror real patterns for your infrastructure and environment
2. Channel Selection: Understanding where and how attackers naturally discover resources

Without this foundation, you're hoping attackers are too inexperienced to notice. The ones that matter will notice immediately.

Communication Channels: Drawing Attention

Creating fake assets is only half the equation. The communication channel must actively draw the ATTENTION of attackers while the asset itself must hold their INTEREST.

Here's the psychology: when attackers encounter information through their standard reconnaissance, they automatically form a hypothesis about what they've discovered. Your job is to ensure that hypothesis leads them exactly where you want them.

Channel strategies that work:

1. Direct Placement - Where attackers naturally look:

   • Developer home directories
   • Source code repositories
   • CI/CD configurations
   • Browser password stores

2. Indirect Discovery - Information sources attackers trust:

   • Internal documentation references
   • Slack conversation mentions
   • JIRA ticket links
   • Password manager entries

3. Environmental Breadcrumbs - Evidence of active use:

   • CloudTrail logs showing recent access
   • Git history with credential "mistakes"
   • Shell history with interesting commands
   • Recently accessed file lists

The key: attackers must discover deception through channels they inherently trust.

The Congruence Principle

For deception to work against skilled adversaries, every element must align with their expectations. Here's the psychological process:

1. Discovery: Attacker encounters information through standard reconnaissance
2. Hypothesis Formation: They form assumptions about what they've found
3. Pattern Matching: They compare discovery against experience and memory
4. Decision Point: If COMMUNICATION and ASSET characteristics are CONGRUENT with their patterns, they interact

An attacker will accept your deception when:

• They discover it through expected channels
• It matches patterns from similar environments
• It appears to help achieve their objectives
• The communication method and asset characteristics reinforce each other
• Nothing triggers their suspicion

The critical insight: attackers can't help but form hypotheses when they encounter information. Your deception succeeds by ensuring those hypotheses lead to the conclusions you want.

Planning Deception Operations

Step 1: Define Precise Goals

"Detect attackers" isn't a goal. These are:

• "Detect credential theft from developer workstations"
• "Identify lateral movement toward financial databases"
• "Alert on unauthorized cloud resource enumeration"

Step 2: Model Your Threats

Understand exactly how attackers operate in environments like yours:

• What are they specifically seeking?
• Which tools and techniques do they employ?
• How do they typically navigate your infrastructure type?

Step 3: Analyze Your Patterns

Build a comprehensive library of authentic characteristics. This becomes your foundation for believable deception.

Step 4: Design Your Assets

Create variety that tells a story:

• Perfect production replicas (for the cautious)
• Slightly misconfigured resources (for the opportunistic)
• Interesting anomalies with backstories (for the curious)

Step 5: Select Your Channels

Place assets where natural discovery occurs. The method matters more than the asset.

Step 6: Integrate Detection

When deception triggers, it means one thing: unauthorized activity. Any interaction = immediate action. Block first, analyze later.

Remember: deception assets must be continuously monitored while communication channels must maintain the ability to draw attacker attention. This dual requirement is why manual deception programs often fail.

Enabling Deception

The complexity of effective deception has led us to develop a systematic approach that scales:

Our Methodology

1. Pattern Ingestion: We analyze your real assets to identify authentic characteristics
2. Deception Planning: Create assets that simulate identified patterns
3. Channel Orchestration: Deploy through multiple vectors attackers monitor
4. Centralized Monitoring: Real-time alerting on any deception interaction
5. Continuous Evolution: Update and expand coverage without alert fatigue

Operational Challenges

Assets must both attract ATTENTION and hold INTEREST:

• Initial discovery through trusted channels captures attention
• Asset characteristics that match real patterns maintain interest
• Congruent communication and asset properties drive interaction

Coverage requires variety:

• Leverage both on-premises and cloud channels
• Deploy across development, production, and administrative contexts
• Include strategic imperfections that tell believable stories

Evolution prevents detection:

• Continuously plan new deceptions
• Update existing assets to reflect infrastructure changes
• Expand communication channels as attacker techniques evolve

This systematic approach transforms deception from a one-time deployment into a living capability that adapts with your environment and threat landscape.

Why This Matters Now

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre describes our challenge perfectly: we face asymmetric adversaries who are "unconstrained by norms, brazen, rapidly improving capabilities, and increasingly sophisticated."

Cloud and SaaS architectures have made this worse. Attackers with valid credentials are indistinguishable from legitimate users. Your EDR won't flag someone reading Confluence. Your SIEM won't alert on normal-looking S3 downloads.

Deception changes the game by creating controlled scenarios that only unauthorized users would encounter. When someone touches that perfectly placed honey token, you gain certainty about unauthorized activity - but only if it's shared through channels attackers trust and appears authentic when discovered

The Path Forward

Effective deception isn't about more fake assets or another security product. It's about understanding how attackers perceive your environment, then crafting illusions they cannot distinguish from reality.

The formula remains simple: Deception Assets + Communication Channels = Desired Effect

But execution requires expertise in both your environment and adversarial methodologies. It demands thinking like an attacker while building like a defender.

In our red teaming experience, the most challenging environments weren't those with the most tools - they were environments where we couldn't trust our discoveries. Where paranoia forced slow, methodical movement that gave defenders time to respond.

That's the power of deception done right: creating an environment where skilled attackers cannot operate with confidence.