Decoy Systems for Computer Crimes: Honeypots

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In a world of computer crime, stolen identities, and network sabotage it would seem that hackers are the ones with the advantage with the rest of us playing the defensive. There are a number of tools that we use to fight back, such as: Anti-virus applications, firewalls, and encryption. These are some of the most well-known defensive strategies but there also exist one that actually encourages attacks, and is commonly called a honeypot. If you can remember the allure that Winnie the Pooh had for honey, the principal idea behind a honeypot should not be difficult to understand.
A honeypot is a decoy system that is purposely set in place to lure attackers under the guise of trapping them or gaining information about who they are (Whitman & Mattord, 2011). A typical honeypot could be an unsecured web server that is setup in such a way that it would appear just begging to be compromised. The reality is that, like a Venus fly trap its only goal is to track the IP address of every person who enters without permission. A common use for such a device would be the same as a sting operation used by the police to locate information about groups of people or individuals. Another tactic of installing a honeypot is to better understand the techniques that attackers are using to commit cyber-crime. These scenarios are then used to design future software and help the planning of security (Whitman & Mattord, 2011).
There are many forms that a honeypot can assume; in fact it can represent nearly anything you want to secure. For example, if you wanted to lure people away from your email server you could implement a virtual server that emulated all real data without actually containing any at all. The attack may then assume that there is no need to ...

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Works Cited

Grimes, R. (2005). Honeypots for windows. (1st ed., p. 424). New York, NY: Apress Publishing. Retrieved from http://www.apress.com/9781590593356
Jens Grossklags & Jean Walrand (Eds.), Decision and Game Theory for Security: Third International Conference, GameSec 2012, Budapest, Hungary, November 5-6, 2012, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Security and Cryptology) (p. 324). New York, NY: Springer Publishing.
Sabu M. Thampi, Pradeep K. Atrey, Chun I. Fan, Gregorio Martinez Perez (Eds.), Security in Computing and Communications: International Symposium, SSCC 2013, Mysore, India, August 22-24, 2013. Proceedings (Communications in Computer and Information Science) (p. 418). New York, NY: Springer Publishing.
Whitman, M. E. & Mattord, H. J. (2011) Principles of Information Security. Boston: Course Technology. (Whitman & Mattord, 2011)

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