Just talked to a client who had dropped a HoneyPoint decoy host in their VPN termination segment a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday, it paid off.

They caught a machine that had passed the anti-virus and patching requirements of the NAC for the VPN. The machine was AV scanned clean. But, immediately upon connection the machine began to port probe hosts around it. This triggered the decoy machine’s HoneyPoints, causing the security team to investigate. The machine was brought in and examined. Closer inspection found it infected with a bot tool that escaped AV detection, but was capable of scanning for bad passwords and a couple of common vulns on surrounding machines. The machine is currently being imaged and rebuilt.

This is an excellent example of how HoneyPoint can help catch bots and malware, even when other controls fail. Defense is depth pays off and the leverage that HoneyPoint provides is often quite powerful, as in this case.

Have you thought about using decoy hosts? If so, how?