Unveiling the Deceptive World: Honeypots vs Honeytokens | Grey Noise Blog

Summary: GreyNoise explains that honeypots and honeytokens serve the shared purpose of early threat detection but differ in deployment, interaction, and scope: honeypots are bogus systems or networks that lure attackers into a monitored environment, while honeytokens are decoy entities such as phony credentials or deceptive database entries that trigger an alert on any interaction. The post traces the honeypot concept to the early 1990s and Fred Cohen's 1998 Deception Toolkit, and credits the term honeytoken to Augusto Paes de Barros in a 2003 mailing list discussion with Lance Spitzner.
Why it matters: Honeypots give broad visibility into attacker tactics at the network and system level, but honeytokens sit at the data level and alert on unauthorized access and insider threats without any attacker interaction - so an organization running only one of the two is blind to what the other catches.

Read the original at GreyNoise Blog ↗