Summary

In this chapter, we looked at the important aspects of actively protecting pen testing assets by using decoy files and explored other related deception ideas.

We looked at various operating systems and explored how to implement decoy files. We also highlighted the benefits and trade-offs of various solutions. Decoy files might trick an adversary who attempts to gain access to your machine by opening interesting looking files. For notifications, we leveraged pop-up notifications on the desktop, emails, as well as logging to files and security event logs.

For Windows, we learned how to build a Windows Service that uses a System Access Control List to audit important files and alert us when they are accessed.

Additionally, we learned how to use OpenBMS on macOS and auditd on Linux to help monitor and audit access. For those who wanted to try out more advanced tasks, we looked at the creation of auditd plugins, which can be leveraged to integrate and customize the auditing...