# What is Deception Technology?

> Deception technology is an industry umbrella term for controlled decoys, fabricated artifacts, misleading responses, and monitoring designed to attract, divert, delay, or reveal unauthorized activity.

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## Content

Examples include decoy systems, services, credentials, records, files, or links that legitimate users and production processes should not need. Interaction can expose adversary behavior or defensive gaps.

A deception program starts with objectives and threat modeling, not a product category. Designers decide who may encounter it, what it should elicit, how it is contained, what evidence is collected, and how responders act.

### Key points

- **Design:** Make decoys plausible, distinguish them from production, restrict their privileges and data, and prevent them from becoming attack infrastructure.
- **Operations:** Monitor interaction and health, protect management paths, document ownership, test response workflows, rotate artifacts, and retire stale deceptions safely.
- **Governance:** Define authorization, collection purpose, retention and access rules, required notice, legal, privacy, and safety review, and escalation rules before deployment.
- **Important limitation:** A deception alert is not automatically proof of an external attacker, and silence does not prove absence of compromise. Misconfiguration, scanners, insiders, or legitimate automation may trigger decoys; sophisticated adversaries may recognize, avoid, or abuse them.

### Related terms

[Honeypot](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/honeypot/>) · [Honeytoken](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/honeytoken/>) · [Canary token](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/canary-token/>) · [Active defense](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/active-defense/>) · [Threat hunting](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/threat-hunting/>)

### Sources

[MITRE Engage: A Practical Guide to Adversary Engagement](https://engage.mitre.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/EngageHandbook-v1.0.pdf) · [NIST SP 800-160 Vol. 2 Rev. 1: Developing Cyber-Resilient Systems](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/160/v2/r1/final) · [NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5: Control SC-26, Decoys](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/53/r5/upd1/final)

## Attribution and scope

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