Deception will defend IT systems

Technologies that deceive hackers by encouraging them to attack imaginary computer systems or trick them into deleting their own data will play an important part in corporate defence systems in the future. Deception technologies, already in use by the military and some large corporations, are likely to become far more mainstream, Fred Cohen, principal analyst of the Burton Group, will tell delegates at Infosecurity Europe. The technologies work by analysing the behaviour of hackers and malicious worms and responding with strategies which not only block the attack, but waste the hacker's time by re-directing them to phantom computer systems.

Cohen, who has worked on a number of collaborative studies on deception technology, said deception could add an extra defence layer on top of firewalls and intrusion detection systems.

"The maths and the experimentation indicated that you can dramatically change the equation between the hacker and the defender by using this technology. Controlled experiments show you can increase the attacker's workload and reduce the time taken to defend," he said.

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