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For the last several years, I’ve been working on a honeypot system to detect “east to west” internal traffic that doesn’t go “north to south” to the internet. The reason is to detect potential threat actors moving laterally in the network. While this doesn’t catch all internal to internal traffic, it does alert on internal traffic to the device. The need for such a device came from a job several years ago.
At a place where I worked, the managers would comment that we could see North-South traffic to and from the internet. But we couldn’t detect potentially malicious East-West traffic internally between systems. We could see East-West between Zones, but not systems in the same zone.
Which lead to the suggestion of Honeypots. Both Management and Legal said we can’t have a honeypot because they believe them to be entrapment devices. Management also didn’t want to give threat actors a beachhead device to take over and use to attack other devices.
What was needed was a device that could act like an alarmed/monitored door, that would alert when used. Something that had next to zero interaction. It took a couple of years but I found a workable solution with Chris Sanders’ Intrusion Detection Honeypots (affiliate link).
