Nationwide Deployment of Honeypot Threat Sensors Unveiled for Enhanced Cybersecurity

In a significant nationwide initiative, a rapid rollout of honeypot threat sensors is set to revolutionize cybersecurity across the country. The project’s primary goal is to establish a comprehensive network of honeypot sensors, generating reliable and actionable threat intelligence. This intelligence will be systematically analyzed and shared with various organizations to fortify efforts in threat prevention and proactive threat detection.

Funded by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), the deployment project is a collaborative effort with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) acting as the main partner and user agency. CERT-In, a national nodal agency for Cyber Security under MeitY, will play a crucial role in obtaining and utilizing the Cyber Threat Intelligence generated from this project to secure the nation’s cyber ecosystem in line with the National Cyber Coordination Centre’s (NCCC) mandate.

The Cyber Threat Intelligence is designed to provide evidence-based knowledge, contextual insights, and indicators in actionable formats directly usable by various security solutions. The project envisions active participation from Government Organizations, State Data Centres (SDC), Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs), Banks, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), R&D and Academic Institutions, as well as private sector organizations offering utility or critical services.

Under this extensive project, seven hundred fifty (750) dynamically configurable honeypot sensors, including the existing 60 locations developed by C-DAC, will be strategically deployed at the premises of participating organizations and institutes. This deployment aims to capture attacks targeting organizational networks, launched by attackers to scan, discover, and exploit potential vulnerabilities in publicly exposed services. The system will also adeptly capture malware binaries resulting from successful exploitation of vulnerabilities implemented on the Honeypot sensor.

Use Cases:

1. Login Page of Threat Intelligence System
2. Health Monitoring of Honeypots
3. Vulnerability Listing, Port/Service Emulated on Honeypot (e.g., CVE Numbers)
4. Deployment of Honeypots’ Images (Dynamic Configuration of Honeypot Images through TIS)

Salient Features:

1. Cyber Threat Monitoring System: A network of honeypots serving as threat-capturing sensors with a central collection and analysis facility.
2. Big Data Scalable Architecture: Ensuring efficient storage and analysis of attack data.
3. Automated Cyber Threat Intelligence Generation
4. Cyber Threat Report Generation