How Deception Outsmarts Hacktivists

 

Forescout’s Vedere Labs recently analyzed an attack by the Russian-aligned group TwoNet, which targeted what they believed was a real water-utility system. In reality, it was a honeypot - a fake environment set up to study attackers.

The case shows how modern deception tools can reveal hacker behavior, stop real intrusions early, and deliver valuable intelligence to security teams.

 

Forescout built a realistic industrial honeypot mimicking a water-treatment system.

 The attackers accessed it, explored industrial protocols like Modbus, and even defaced the interface - believing they had compromised a real target.

 Instead, every move was tracked. The result: full visibility into attacker methods, without any damage to real assets.

 

• Faster detection, lower operational overhead. Because decoys produce high-confidence alerts, SOCs spend less time chasing benign anomalies and more time on verified intrusions - improving MTTR and freeing analyst time. labyrinth.tech

• Reduced risk and compliance value. Intelligence derived from honeypots helps prioritize remediation where it matters (e.g., exposed OT devices, weak authentication, or risky remote access), supporting audit/standards work and reducing the probability of costly downtime or regulatory penalties. Forescout lists eliminate-weak-auth and remove-internet-exposure among its top mitigations for OT. Forescout

• Actionable threat intelligence for prevention. Honeypot captures feed into patching, network segmentation strategies, and can update DPI/IDS rules to detect real-world variants sooner. Forescout+1

• Deterrence and deception ROI. Slowing and misleading attackers increases the work an adversary must do, raises attacker cost, and reduces the chance of successful lateral movement - tangible ROI when measured in prevented incidents and reduced response costs.

 

Labyrinth’s platform is built around the deception playbook that Forescout’s case highlights:

• Early detection with high-fidelity decoys. The platform blends realistic IT service imitations and fake artifacts into networks so adversaries interacting with them trigger clear detections and low false positives. This is exactly how honeypots surface attacker activity early. 

• Active involvement - slowing and misleading attackers. Labyrinth emphasizes high-interaction decoys that lure attackers, keep them busy, and collect full attack traces while leaving production systems unaffected - letting defenders learn attacker techniques safely. 

• Investigation made easy. A centralized management console and map view make it straightforward to investigate the source and timeline of deception engagements - speeding incident triage and forensic work. 

• Automated response integrations. When severity thresholds are met, Labyrinth can trigger automated actions (isolate host, terminate session) via integrations, turning detection into immediate containment. This reduces dwell time and helps stop active manipulation of OT devices. 

• Attack-vector validation (Seeker). Labyrinth’s Seeker module simulates attacks to validate security controls, uncover misconfigurations, and exercise SOC response - a continuous assurance capability that complements passive deception intelligence. 

 

Deception is not just protection - it’s intelligence.

 It shows where attackers go, how they move, and what they want.

 Combined with strong network segmentation and authentication, honeypots make attacks slower, costlier, and easier to contain.

 Labyrinth’s approach helps companies turn deception into an advantage - detecting threats early and turning every attack attempt into actionable insight.