• CISA urged organizations to deploy honeypots, lures, and honeytokens as cyber decoys
• Decoys complement Zero Trust by detecting LOTL activity and producing high‑fidelity alerts
• Guidance outlines tripwires, breadcrumbs, MITRE ATT&CK/Engage steps for scalable implementation

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is urging organizations to deploy honeypots and various lures to better detect cyber-intrusions and keep hackers busy with spoofed materials. To that end, it recently published a new guidance to help businesses of different sizes and cybersecurity maturity implement these “cyber decoy strategies”.

“Many organizations struggle to detect adversaries who use legitimate credentials, native tools, and living off the land (LOTL) techniques to conduct discovery, move laterally, and access data,.” CISA said in a new security advisory.

“Cyber decoys are assets that appear to be legitimate systems, accounts, or data, but are designed to distract adversaries, detect their presence, or facilitate collection of cyber threat intelligence (CTI). As organizations adopt Zero Trust models, they should assume that a malicious threat actor may gain some level of access to their environment and plan accordingly.”

Tripwires, breadcrumbs, and honeytokens

CISA’s advisory hints that Zero Trust is the preferred way to go about securing corporate infrastructure. Zero Trust treats no user, device, or network segment as inherently trustworthy and requires organizations to operate on the assumption that compromise is inevitable, it says. If you want to learn more, read our in-depth guide on what ZTNA is.

However, it adds that cyber decoys are consistent with this paradigm and complement ZTNA by supporting continuous monitoring and verification, creating high-fidelity alerts for suspicious activity, reducing alert fatigue, and helping defenders detect post-compromise activity such as adversary LOTL techniques. They are also incremental, cost-effective, and scalable, and can be introduced into the cybersecurity tech stack without major architectural changes.

The guidance can be found on this link (PDF). It introduces different decoy concepts such as tripwires, breadcrumbs, and honeytokens, and uses the MITRE Engage and MITRE ATT&CK frameworks to provide the steps needed to plan, implement, and refine these operations.