Honeypots: Tracking Hackers

Chapter 16. Future of Honeypots

For such an exciting technology, honeypots have been adopted slowly by the security community. The concept of honeypots has been around for years, first publicly introduced in 1990. As we discussed in Chapter 3, Cliff Stoll and Bill Cheswick introduced us to the world of honeypots through their published works The Cuckoo’s Egg [1] and “An Evening With Berferd” [2]. While neither specifically uses the term honeypot, the concepts they discuss lay the foundation for honeypot technologies. The first public honeypot was Fred Cohen’s DeceptionToolkit, released in 1997, seven years after the works of Stoll and Cheswick. A year later in 1998 we saw the creation of CyberCop Sting by Alfred Huger. However, even then honeypots ...