If you want to enjoy your sunny afternoon coffee in the garden undisturbed by wasps, it may be advisable to up a honeypot: This can be a small bowl with a few drops of honey or a wasp trap with a narrow bottle neck. Both serve the purpose and lure the wasps away from the garden table. The Honeypot in Cyber Security works according to the same principle: It attracts cyber attacks from hackers and allows, for example, analyses of attack patterns (compare also: Cyber Kill Chain). Deutsche Telekom registered up to 46 million hacker attacks on its own infrastructure in 2019, with a strong upward trend.
Honeypots are simulated attack targets of various types. On the one hand, entire websites and IT infrastructures of power plants are set up, which do not even exist. On the other hand, companies also create areas within their IT infrastructure to which hackers are led after a successful attack; here, for example, the hackers' actions can be analysed or hacker activities can be easily detected (early indicator of a hacker attack). Deutsche Telekom operates around 3,000 honeypots for cyber intelligence purposes.
