AI-Powered Security Systems: Honeypot Threat Intelligence

The use of digital systems and tools is expending tremendously on a daily basis which at the same time, increase the number of threats and risks that organizations and individual are exposed to. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a great role in helping security teams in organizations to protect themselves from the wide varieties of cyber threats which increases with each additional device and system that connects to the internet. 

How AI helps in securing our organization and ourself? 

With the large number of threats and connected devices, it becomes difficult to the capacity of a human being to track and monitor each and every breach that takes place, as well hard to monitor and analyze the different types of traffic that are crossing through the network’s security systems and to identify any anomaly in addition to detect any intrusion that occurs. 

Hence, the usage of AI came into action, where it analyzes the traffic and uses of machine learning to develop itself based on the context and the configured algorithm. 

Hundreds and thousands of analyzed transactions take place on the traffic, and on configured devices to identify any gap or suspected attack or intrusions by generating alarms, therefore it reduces the workforce and helps security teams in identifying such matters efficiently according to certain behavior and values that has been set during the configuration of the devices. 

Imagine a network of  thousands of surveillance cameras displaying their images to the screens in a control center to 10th of people who are monitoring and checking if any intrusion or misconduct happens; even with that number of human eyes staring into those big screens looking for incidents and intrusions to act on, intruders will be able to find a room in the systems to hack and cross the areas without being cached by those eyes due to carelessness which we face all times in such circumstances. However, with AI in place, such incidents will rarely happen as it can detect much faster than the human being eyes and generate alerts and even highlight the area of the incident in a fraction of seconds, and the most important AI will not be biased, get exhausted or feel that nothing will happen. 

Honeypot, is one of the  tools that helps cybersecurity professional in securing and protecting their organizations' network and system using the artificial intelligence. 

What is Honeypot, and how it works? 

Initially, Honeypot is an old technic used since decades in the field of espionage, where a person or undercover agent decoys a spy or criminal to look after his or her intention and the objectives of their missions in a way to get more information and knowledge about them and the entity, they belong to. 

In cybersecurity, it is almost the same, where the cybersecurity team build an entire system composed of network devices, systems, and applications that operates and act as the original production system with an objective to decoy and lure any hacking attempts from its original objective of hacking and to stop it from damaging the main systems by giving them a very similar but vulnerable system so they waste their time and study their behavior to better identify their objectives, and get more knowledge about the tools they are using and the data which they are looking after. 

The honeypot will help the security team to better identify the vulnerabilities in their systems and the different types of data hackers are looking after, in addition to getting more knowledge and details about the different hacking tools attackers are using to infiltrate their systems. Thus, the honeypot will give the security team the opportunity to enhance their production systems and to tighten their security against those malicious attacks that have been identified using the honeypot,  

All collected information can help and teach the honeypot system which gives information to the security specialist on the action that is required to be taken to better protect the organizational network as well as to block such types of attacks from getting into the original system. 

Implementing a honeypot is not that easy and requires expertise and a financial budget, which differs from a type to the other, in addition to selecting the suitable type for your business. 

Therefore, and before deploying a honeypot it is good to have a good plan which covers the following: 

• The objective of the honeypot, like is it for forensic analysis or to generate an early warning when an attack occurs? 
• Due to the complexity and financial requirement to build a honeypot, it’s good to have a clear idea about the systems and applications you are willing to mimic in your honeypot and the level of interaction you need the honeypot to engage the hacker with. 

Even, the honeypot is meant to decoy attackers, but once identified, they might get the privilege of it and make it a source of an attack, or even can use it to connect to your network thus an eye should be always kept to monitor what hackers are doing when connected to your honeypot. 

The most important is to know the main objective of deploying a honeypot is not to protect the organization but to study the cyberattack technics, behaviors to enhance the existent security system to face and be more resilient when facing such type of attacks.