Science Daily June 2, 2021
Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have created a cybersecurity technology called Shadow Figment which uses artificial intelligence to deploy elaborate deception to keep attackers engaged in a pretend world — the figment — that mirrors the real world. The decoy interacts with users in real time, responding in realistic ways to commands. It rewards hackers with false signals of success, keeping them occupied while defenders learn about the attackers’ methods and take actions to protect the real system. The credibility of the deception relies on a machine learning program that learns from observing the real-world system where it is installed. The program responds to an attack by sending signals that illustrate that the system under attack is responding in plausible ways. This “model-driven dynamic deception” is much more realistic than a static decoy. Shadow Figment needs to be one piece of a broader program of cybersecurity defense…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE