Efficient implementation of honeypot devices to detect wide-scale network attacks

Abstract

The present disclosure generally relates to enabling efficient implementation of honeypot devices in a honeypot service environment. Each honeypot device can be implemented as a virtualized device, executing software modified from a production version of a device such that interactions with the honeypot device closely match interactions with a production device. By using virtualization, each honeypot device can be reset to a known good state when a potential security breach occurs. Because network-based attacks are often wide-spread, the honeypot service environment can deduplicate attacks that occur at a large number of devices, discarding duplicate attack traffic to reduce overall load on the environment. While deduplication can be inappropriate for production environments (given the corresponding data loss), deduplication in a honeypot environment can reduce load while still enabling detection of a network attack.