Comparing deception technology vendors — what are the differences, is it overkill for a 20-person company?

What is an attacker even going to do in a 20-person company to fall into a honeypot? Your network is probably just a single subnet and a few cloud servers anyway. Deception tech is meant for enterprise giants with thousands of servers and hundreds of complex privilege tiers to catch lateral movement. You're just helping some sales rep hit their quota.

The biggest differentiator between vendors is static emulation vs. real OS decoys. Cheap solutions just spoof open ports, and an attacker realizes it's fake two commands in. The expensive ones run actual virtual machines, but patching and licensing them is an operational nightmare of its own.

If you want to experiment with canary/decoy concepts, no need to spend money. Set up basic open-source honeypots in an isolated cloud subnet, or use free canary token tools that drop a fake document in important folders and email you when opened. It'll let you test the waters.

We made this exact mistake last year on our 35-person team. Paid 15,000 USD for a product. Over an entire year the system generated 2 alerts total; both were just network scanner tools run by our new intern. If we'd spent half that budget on two external pentests we would have actually patched real vulnerabilities.

In the security pyramid, prevention comes before detection. Is your multi-factor authentication (MFA) fully enforced everywhere, are cloud misconfigurations being scanned, do you run phishing simulations on employees? If those aren't rock solid, deception tech is just a shiny luxury toy.

When vetting vendors, watch out for these three things: 1) Do the fake credentials generated by the product slow down your actual systems? 2) Can the management console push instant alerts directly to your team's chat or ticketing tool? 3) How many hours of engineering time does it demand weekly for upkeep?

You mentioned storing healthcare data. Have you fulfilled the mandatory encryption and access logging requirements required by regulations? If a compliance auditor comes in and finds basic access logs missing, fancy deception tools won't shield you from fines whatsoever.

This is exactly what we experienced. If you scold false alarms nobody will report again.

If I were you, I'd go this route.

I've been dealing with this for a long time. Just because everyone does it doesn't mean it's right.

This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.

I'd say don't rush. When making a decision, first look at what data you have on hand.

If permission and scope aren't in writing don't start that test.

The answer above hits the nail on the head. Security isn't absolute; it's about making attacks not worth the effort.

Hope this helps.

we've heeard this a lot but it never happened like that for us. anyway if you get three different answers on a topic the question was asked wrong.

Thanks a lot, I'll try it today.

There are three things to check when doing this. Security isn't absolute; it's about making attacks not worth the effort.

How did you solve this? Security isn't absolute; it's about making attacks not worth the effort.

If you post the result here it will help others too.

I went through the same thing two years ago. When making a decision, first look at what data you have on hand.

Good luck with that.

Let me clarify the technical side. Solutions that work at a small scale collapse when you grow; I learned this late.

When making decisions, write down the worst-case scenario too, not just the best. If I were you, I'd go this route.

noted thanks.