Physical Deception

What It Does

Seed facilities with tokens whose only plausible use is by someone who should not have them — dropped media, decoy badges, decoy racks.

Observable indicator. Physical decoy interaction produces findings with no false-positive tail.

Where It Sits

A technique is chosen from inside a form and emplaced on one layer. Both are the catalog’s own declarations; the position is counted in catalog order.

• Form of maneuverM5 AmbushTrade space for information and time, and impose cost.
• Terrain layerT8 FacilitiesThe physical boundary. Key terrain: Data center and wiring closet boundaries, public-access areas, maintenance routes.
• Position in the form13 of 13M5 carries 13 cataloged techniques; this is the 13th in catalog order.

Phases It Is Employed In

Employed in one phase of the campaign. A phase named here means at least this technique is live in it — not that the form it belongs to is the main effort.

• Phase IDeterVisible hardening, a deception grid, and a stated attribution posture.

Controls That Assess It

The controls the catalog names against this technique. They are what an assessor would test to establish that it is emplaced and working — the indicator above is what shows it is working, which is a different question.

• FC-1 Facility Terrain IdentificationFacilities Terrain — To resolve the estate to physical locations, so that defense, recovery and continuity can be reasoned about in the place things actually are.
• CE-3 Fusion and ConfidenceCycle Execution and Assurance — To distinguish assessment from assertion, so that decisions taken on analytic conclusions carry the uncertainty of those conclusions with them.
• SM-7 Deception EmplacementScheme of Maneuver — To obtain detection with no false-positive budget, and to ensure that signal is acted on rather than queued.

In MITRE D3FEND

What this technique is called in MITRE’s countermeasure ontology. The join runs technique-to-technique: D3FEND catalogs countermeasures, and the thing with a countermeasure’s shape here is the technique, not the control.

• D3-SHN Standalone HoneynetDeceive tactic
• D3-DO Decoy ObjectDeceive tactic

That a technique reaches a D3FEND countermeasure says the two describe the same defensive act. It does not say the countermeasure is deployed, configured, or working — that is an assessment finding about your estate, not a property of the framework.

Related Techniques

The catalog declares no relation for this entry, and no other entry names it — the inverse is derived here, so an incoming edge would show up even though this one never declared it. The techniques below share its assessment surface, which is the nearest adjacency the data supports.

Assessed Alongside

Not a declared relation: these are the techniques whose assessing controls overlap this one’s, ranked by how much of the two assessment surfaces coincide. Showing 6 of 18 that share at least one control.

• 2 shared controlsM1.13 Physical Access Anomaly DetectionM1 Screen / Guard · T8 Facilities
  • CE-3
  • FC-1
• 2 shared controlsM5.09 Deception Alert RoutingM5 Ambush · TX Cross-Cutting
  • CE-3
  • SM-7
• 1 shared controlM1.10 Named-Campaign Indicator WatchM1 Screen / Guard · TX Cross-Cutting
  • CE-3
• 1 shared controlM2.17 Facility Defense in DepthM2 Defense in Depth · T8 Facilities
  • FC-1
• 1 shared controlM4.15 Physical Zone SegregationM4 Obstacle / Canalization · T8 Facilities
  • FC-1
• 1 shared controlM7.01 Hypothesis-Driven HuntingM7 Counterattack · TX Cross-Cutting
  • CE-3