The Importance of using Cyber Deception as Part of Cybersecurity Strategy

Posted on December 10, 2025  •  5 minutes  • 1051 words

AI and LLMs have changed cybersecurity, but the real shift for defenders isn’t AI-generated malware. It’s how attackers operate.

Today’s attackers increasingly log in with stolen credentials instead of deploying malware. They abuse legitimate tools, compromise supply chains, and quietly persist in environments long before taking overt action.

Meanwhile, security teams face shrinking budgets, leaner teams, and higher expectations. Even well-funded organizations struggle to maintain visibility against increasingly evasive adversaries.

Working harder isn’t the answer. Working smarter is.

That’s why organizations should consider deception as a core cybersecurity strategy.

Even in organizations with bigger budgets, attackers are figuring out ways to evade detection, compromising supply chains, and logging in with stolen credentials instead of running malware that traditional defenses can catch.

What is the Current Strategy?

Analogy: Protect the King in the Castle

The current defense strategy can be summed up in one sentence: protect the king in the castle and equip the castle with the best guns.

This approach assumes that the castle you built won’t require significant changes in the future. But in IT, like any homeowner will know, the castle will always need fine-tuning—upgrading its weapons, training staff, and dealing with projects that go on longer than originally thought.

This sounds great in practice, but you have to make sure you always have the biggest gun, that the people with the guns are well-trained, and most importantly—it tells other people where the king is.

The Problem

Attackers know what to look for. They know where your critical systems are. They know what security tools you’re likely using. The castle approach is predictable, and predictability is a defender’s weakness.

What is Cyber Deception?

Analogy: Build Many Castles

Deception takes a different approach: You build equal castles with defenses. Only you know where the king is.

When an attacker approaches your environment:

• The noise the attacker generates is the alert - they reveal themselves by touching what they shouldn’t
• You collect intel on what the attacker is doing and their techniques
• You gain time to harden defenses where needed
• You bridge gaps in your security posture before real damage occurs

The attacker must guess which castle holds the king, using time and resources while you watch, learn, and respond.

Why This Could Be a Better Way with EDR

The Power of Combining Deception with EDR

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools are excellent at detecting known threats and suspicious behavior on endpoints. But they work best when they have context about what’s happening across your environment.

Deception enhances EDR in several ways:

1. Early Warning System

• Deception catches attackers during reconnaissance, before they reach real assets
• EDR gets advanced notice to watch for specific attack patterns
• Security teams can proactively hunt based on deception intelligence

2. High-Fidelity Alerts

• Deception creates a low amount of false positives (no legitimate user should touch decoys)
• Reduces alert fatigue for security teams

3. Attacker Intelligence

• Observe attacker techniques
• Feed this intelligence into EDR detection rules

4. Extended Visibility

• Deception fills visibility gaps where EDR agents might not be deployed
• Creates tripwires across network segments
• Provides coverage for legacy systems that can’t run modern EDR

5. Slows Down Attackers

• Gives incident response teams time to contain before exfiltration
• Forces attackers to be noisier, making EDR detection easier

The Combined Approach

When an attacker touches a decoy:

1. Deception system alerts immediately (high-confidence threat)
2. EDR investigates the source endpoint for compromise indicators
3. Security team analyzes attacker TTPs from deception logs
4. EDR hunts proactively for similar behavior across all endpoints
5. Response team contains the threat before it reaches critical assets

This creates a defense-in-depth strategy where deception provides early detection and EDR provides detailed endpoint visibility and response capabilities.

Key Steps to Incorporating Deception in Your Environment

1. Identify the Crown Jewels (Your Castles)

You cannot protect what you don’t know.

• Map your critical assets: databases, file servers, domain controllers, sensitive applications
• Understand your most valuable data and where it lives
• Identify the paths attackers would take to reach these assets
• Document which systems, if compromised, would cause the most damage

Why this matters: Deception is most effective when deployed strategically around your actual crown jewels. You need to know what you’re protecting before you can create convincing distractions.

2. Create Believable Decoys (Make the Castles Look Real)

Make sure the decoys mimic the real environment.

• Deploy fake servers, workstations, and databases that match your actual infrastructure
• Plant fake credentials in files, memory, and configuration files
• Create decoy network shares with realistic-looking documents
• Ensure decoys have appropriate names, roles, and apparent purposes

Why this matters: If decoys look fake or abandoned, sophisticated attackers will ignore them. They need to be indistinguishable from real assets to be effective traps.

3. Alert and Triage Correctly (Know When the Castle is Under Attack)

Make sure your team knows when a decoy has been touched.

• Integrate deception alerts with your SIEM and EDR
• Create clear escalation procedures for deception alerts
• Train your security team to recognize and respond to deception events
• Establish playbooks for investigating deception triggers

Why this matters: A deception alert is one of the highest-fidelity signals you can get—there’s no legitimate reason for anyone to interact with a decoy. But this only works if your team knows how to act on these alerts quickly and effectively.

Getting Started

Start Small:

1. Deploy a few decoy credentials in common locations
2. Create 2-3 fake servers that look important
3. Monitor for any interactions
4. Use findings to improve your real defenses

Scale Gradually:

• Add more decoys as you learn what works
• Expand coverage to different network segments
• Integrate more deeply with EDR and SIEM
• Refine based on attacker behavior you observe

Measure Success:

• Time to detect threats (should decrease)
• Quality of threat intelligence gathered
• Number of attacks caught before reaching real assets
• Reduction in dwell time for threats

Conclusion

The cybersecurity landscape has changed. Attackers are smarter, faster, and more evasive. Traditional “castle defense” strategies are necessary but no longer sufficient.

By incorporating deception, you shift from a purely reactive posture to a proactive one. You create uncertainty for attackers, gain early warning of threats, and gather intelligence that makes all your other security tools more effective.

Don’t just build a better castle. Build many castles, and let attackers waste their time and reveal themselves while your real crown jewels remain hidden and protected.