For the first time, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is advising critical infrastructure owners and operators on how to set up phony systems, accounts and data to deceive would-be hackers into being distracted and discovered.

The Wednesday guidance, “Using Cyber Decoys to Strengthen Detection and Response,” arose from internal discussions with CISA’s threat hunters and penetration testers about how decoys can be a cheap, effective way to disrupt attackers, said Chris Butera, acting executive director of the cybersecurity division.

‘We’ve been looking at it for a while, and we believe that decoys can be both a very low-cost but actually high-fidelity way to detect an adversary who’s already gained access to networks,” Butera told CyberScoop at Google Cloud’s Cyber Defense Summit 26.

It’s especially complementary for zero-trust (maintaining that no user or device is trustworthy by default) and assume-compromise (assuming that hackers have already gotten into a network) approaches, Butera said.

While the guidance is “really relevant for everyone,” it’s something that can be especially useful in critical infrastructure sectors that don’t have the most personnel or money, he said.

“This could be something to prioritize as a lower cost solution,” Butera said. “You can create your own honey tokens yourself.”

The 22-page guidance includes decoy principles and goals, definitions of the different kinds of decoys and how to use them and scenarios for deployment.

Honeytokens, for instance, are “Data elements or logical objects with no legitimate business use (e.g., fake records, credentials, or files) planted to detect unauthorized access or exfiltration. Any interaction strongly suggests malicious or otherwise unauthorized activity.”

“Cyber decoys used in a proactive cyber defense strategy help make critical infrastructure networks unfriendly places for adversaries and enhance resilience to compromise, even against living-off-the-land techniques,” Butera said in a news release. “With this guide, CISA is raising awareness of cyber decoy techniques and enabling any defensive team regardless of skill level to understand the value and steps to implementing decoy operations. CISA encourages critical infrastructure organizations to review this guide and implement a cyber decoy strategy.” 

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Toolkits to wage phishing campaigns are a now-venerable instrument for cybercriminals, but researchers recently turned up details on something like a full-fledged “business email compromise-as-a-service” platform.

Cisco Talos said Wednesday that it had found an operator panel dubbed ARToken, which shares infrastructure and other things in common with, and as an affiliate to, the EvilTokens phishing-as-a-service operation built to bypass multi-factor authentication and compromise Microsoft 365 accounts. EvilTokens has reportedly seen a dramatic increase in its phishing attacks — by 1,380% early this year compared to the same period last year — with an assist from artificial intelligence integration.

ARToken is notable, though, for the capabilities that go beyond what’s been made public about EvilTokens so far by companies like Sekoia and Microsoft itself, such as inbox rule manipulation and shared access links.

“These features indicate the platform is more mature than a simple device code phishing kit — it is a complete BEC operations environment,” wrote Michael Kelley, security research engineer at Cisco Talos, in a blog post, referring to business email compromise scams that involve sending fake emails to solicit fraudulent payments.

Kelley told CyberScoop that “we’ve seen some offerings that touch on this capability, but this definitely seems more fleshed out and polished than previous instances.”

ARToken is also notable for its evasive capabilities, with a seven-layer anti-analysis system, the post states.

The research provides further details on what ARToken’s actual phishing lures look like in practice. They are targeted, rather than scattershot and opportunistic, as one lure the firm examined shows.

“The messages spoof an accounts-payable contact at a legitimate Wisconsin contractor, addressed to an accounts-payable recipient at a U.S. life sciences company — abusing a real vendor relationship rather than inventing a sender,” Kelley wrote. “The lure theme is an outstanding-invoice inquiry (‘the following invoices appear to still be outstanding… advise when this will be processed’), the kind of message accounts-payable staff are conditioned to act on.”

Kelley told CyberScoop that Cisco Talos doesn’t yet have a full sense of the breadth of the activity, nor who is making use of the capability.

“We’ve seen the public sector targeted but it’s unlikely to be the only one,” he said.

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