Optus, Uber hacks highlight the need for more honey pots

Uber and Optus hacks highlight the importance of honey pots, the slightly less sexy cyber equivalent of the intelligence world’s honey trap, say experts.

Honey pots, used to lure cyber criminals, are becoming increasingly important.

The age-old honey trap has been the undoing of many great diplomats, spies and workers from governments’ highest offices.

In the digital age, it has been increasingly used to target workers of the same groups on dating platforms Tinder, Bumble and Hinge, in a format that many say involves little honey and lots of trap.

Many were given a rude shock earlier this year when Liberal Senator James Paterson warned on national radio that ASIO was monitoring traps on dating platforms.

“If you’re a six and they’re a 10 – it might not be your looks that they’ve been charmed by,”

he said.

In the tech industry, a slightly less sexy version of the honey trap is being used to lure global hackers into giving away their secrets, from their slippery password stealing methods to the software they use and their location.

Over the past week, as nearly 10 million Optus customers learned their personal information had been obtained in what has been described as a “non-sophisticated hack”, the term has come up several times, igniting the importance of using traps to bait and lure hackers.

Honey pots are being increasingly deployed by companies, including Nozomi Networks.

Last month the company released research from a series of honey pots it set in the first half of this year.

Nozomi Networks says in march it recorded 12,000 malicious hack attempts.

In March, the San Francisco-based software company, which has a local arm, recorded 12,000 malicious attempts from IoT (internet of things) Botnets – a group of devices connected to the internet commonly used to deploy spam.

Those attempts came from some 5000 IP addresses – the Internet Protocol address identifying a device which can connect to the internet – associated with the US and China.

Nozomi Networks West Australia-based regional manager Ameen Al-Majzoub said the funny thing about those IP addresses was that while the hacker might not be based in those countries, the infrastructure and devices were.

And it was likely that foreign hackers set up hacking networks in other countries and relied upon locals to deploy hacking attempts.

Optus has said that the hackers that stole its customer data were using IP addressed detected in various locations across Europe.

David Callan, a former ASIO intelligence officer and one half of the I Spied podcast, said that honey pots bare some similarity to honey traps which play a major role in the intelligence world.

“Up until recently, cybersecurity has really been like the Wild West; it’s a bit of a cowboys game,” he said.

“And now that they’re beginning to sort of build in these honey pots, which are basically setting a target out there that appears so lucrative that you can just grab a hold of it, you can start identifying who the player is in the cyber war that you’re currently waging.”

Asked if ASIO deployed honey traps, Mr Callan said he didn’t believe so and that any organisation that did would never admit to it.

“Beyond what most people think, honey traps are incredibly micromanaged through the intelligence world when they are actually used simply because they are an exceptionally complicated thing,” he said.

“ASIO is more about protection, therefore it is something that ASIO would be working to counter as opposed to working to set.

“It would be something I would imagine someone like ASIS would do, but again, no intelligence organisation wants to admit that they do it because it’s regarded as morally dubious, and the other thing as well is the embarrassment factor if it goes wrong.”

Originally published as Optus, Uber hacks highlight the need for more honey pots