Scrambling the Cuckoo's Egg

One of the earliest computing honeypots was created as Clifford Stoll allowed the Hannover hacker to waltz through Berkeley's network unchecked—little did the attacker know he was being watched. Using their network as a high-interaction honeynet, Stoll reverse social engineered attackers into requesting information about the fabricated SDINET project; this provided more information about the scope and severity of the attacks. Many modern attack vectors rely on social engineering. Honeypots could be rigged to provide records of fake employees—each associated with social media accounts, email addresses, and phone numbers. This falsified information would then be closely monitored so that social engineering attacks could be observed. These honeypots would require more resources than conventional honeypots: automation is difficult; and humans need to respond directly to attackers in some cases, such as phone calls. Still, the results would be interesting.