What is a Honeypot?
A Honeypot is a computer program designed to trick attackers into believing they have access to a legitimate target. These carefully designed tools play an important role in cybersecurity research, allowing experts to better understand cyberattacks and strategies used by malicious attackers. By luring and trapping attackers, honeypots allow organizations to identify, measure, and block attempts to compromise their real systems.
The term honeypot refers to a rogue device used to attract unknown traffic on a network. For example, a honeypot can be a virtual server, network device, network port, or web server designed to provide the impression of a live device. It contains fake information and information that could be useful to an attacker.
Administrators set minimum protection on honeypot devices so that intruders can easily access the honeypot. Traffic will be controlled by the administrator.
A honey pot is an interesting technology. Essentially, it assumes that an attacker is able to breach your network security. And it would be best to distract that attacker away from your valuable data. Therefore, one creates a server that has fake data— perhaps an SQL server or Oracle server loaded with fake data, and just a little less secure than your real servers. Then, since none of your actual users ever access this server, monitoring software is installed to alert you when someone does access this server.
A honey pot achieves two goals. First, it will take the attacker’s attention away from the data you wish to protect. Second, it will provide what appears to be interesting and valuable data, thus leading the attacker to stay connected to the fake server, giving you time to try to track them.
Honeypot vs Honeynet
Honeypots and Honeynets are cybersecurity measures used to help organizations detect, identify, and understand cyber attack methods. Although they share the same goal, each has unique characteristics that contribute to cyber security. In this article, we will learn about the workings of honeypots and honeynets with their working advantages and disadvantages, and how they are different from each other.