Definition
Establishing a fake online identity to misdirect, deceive, and or interact with adversaries.
How it works
A false online identity is created for the purposes of interacting with adversaries in a direct or indirect manner. This includes the associated email addresses, social media accounts, and other online communication profiles.
Considerations
- Include phone numbers and online social profiles as well as automatically or manually responding to contact made to the persona to improve realism.
- Continuous updating and managing the decoy personas and online activity streams to ensure personas do not become stale and outdated.
Implementation perspective
Decoy Persona should be treated as a technical defensive capability rather than a product checkbox. In practice, teams should define the protected scope, the conditions under which the technique acts, and the observable evidence that demonstrates the intended behavior. For this technique, likely engineering context includes the relevant system, activity, and evidence sources.
Use the technique to present controlled information, services, or artifacts that shape adversary behavior and create observable interaction.
Questions to ask
- What behavior is the deceptive element intended to attract, delay, reveal, or redirect?
- How is the deceptive element made plausible without creating unacceptable operational risk?
- Which interactions are monitored, and who investigates them?
- How is the deceptive environment isolated from production systems and sensitive data?
Evidence and validation
- Design records describing the deception objective and placement
- Isolation and containment test results
- Monitoring and alert-routing configuration
- Interaction records and documented investigative outcomes
Common failure patterns
- The deceptive element is obvious, stale, or inconsistent with the surrounding environment.
- Interactions are collected but not reviewed or connected to response processes.
- The decoy introduces a new pathway to production data or systems.
This implementation perspective is original Bare Metal Cyber educational content. It does not replace the official D3FEND definition or establish that a specific product implements the technique.
Technique hierarchy
Top-level family
Parent techniques
Direct child techniques
None listed at this level.
Artifacts and ontology entities
These relationships describe how D3FEND connects a defensive technique to artifacts or other ontology entities. They describe graph semantics, not a product certification.
Explicit technique relationships
Authoritative sources
- Open this technique on the official D3FEND website ↗
- Open the official ontology resources ↗
- Decoy and deceptive data object technology ↗Cymmetria, Inc. · Dean Sysman, Gadi Evron, Imri Goldberg, Itamar Sher, Shmuel Ur · PatentReference
- Decoy Personas for Safeguarding Online Identity Using Deception ↗SANS · Lenny Zeltser · InternetArticleReference
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