Vendor claims deception technology isn't the same as a honeypot, what's the difference?

What the vendor is saying is technically accurate, but wrapped in heavy marketing spin. Honeypots are passive; these platforms actively distribute lures across endpoints. That said, spending money on this level of luxury before you've locked down fundamental access controls, multi-factor authentication, and patch management in a 45-person shop is the wrong investment.

If an attacker has already reached the point where they've breached your machine and are dumping memory, they're likely going to spot the commercial security agent installed on it anyway. The decoys dropped by commercial deception tools eventually become known signatures flagged by offensive tooling. Instead of dropping 18,000 USD on this, put that money toward a solid penetration test.

The difference lies directly in the trigger mechanism. A honeypot listens on an IP level; if the attacker doesn't port scan that specific IP, it's useless. Deception tools, on the other hand, inject fake tickets or bogus SSH keys into the Local Security Authority (LSA). The moment the attacker tries to escalate privileges using that key, the system locks down from the central console.

Before buying any licenses try out free canary tokens. Drop a file containing a decoy link inside critical directories or set up a dummy service account on the server. If anyone touches these traps, you'll get an alert. For small teams, this approach provides more than enough protection for months.

We tested a similar tool in an office of 60 people. Not a single alert went off for three months, then one day a newly hired intern opened a fake accounting spreadsheet in a shared network folder and the alarms went off immediately. The false positive rate is truly zero, but when there's no attack happening, you completely forget it even exists.

Before approving an annual budget of 18,000 USD, I recommend requesting a two-week proof of concept (PoC) study from the vendor on your corporate network. A contract should not be signed without evaluating the quality of the telemetry generated within the organization's own infrastructure.

they took the old honeypot, sprinkled some AI sauce on it, threw a couple of fake passwords onto the endpoints, and slapped the name deception technology on it but tbh the price shot up 5x overnight too. the salespersons biggest feat of deception will be getting that 18k invoice approved.

Edit: asked below, I wrote the answer in the second message.

there is something to watch out for. an automated scan report is not the same as a penetration test.

everything goes well for the fist three months; problems arise in the fourth but good luck with that.

I disagree with you on this point. The harder it is to reverse a decision, the slower you should make it.

Hasty decisions become decisions you have to fix six months later. I'm also curious if anyone does it differently.

i feel the same way. solutions that work at a small scale collapse when you grow; I learned this late.

the biggest time-waster for us was not knowing who had the final say.

There's also a measurement aspect to this. If you scold false alarms, nobody will report again.

Your time to detect an issue directly determines its cost. This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.

This approach has a cost, which isn't discussed. Don't rely on a single measure; go layer by layer.

If you get three different answers on a topic, the question was asked wrong. Hope this helps.

Thanks for posting. Solutions that work at a small scale collapse when you grow; I learned this late.

That's all, sorry if I went on too long.

quick summary for newcomers: Trying to do this alone is the most expensive way.

i'm also curious if anyone does it differently.

I think it's hard to be that definitive about deception technology vs honeypot difference. If you don't write this down from the start, it leads to arguments later.

An untested backup is not a backup.

I'm curious too.

I didn't know that.

I disagree with you on this point. An automated scan report is not the same as a penetration test.

Your time to detect an issue directly determines its cost.