Attackers don’t start by breaking in. They start by watching you. Deception makes that reconnaissance in cybersecurity visible because any touch on a believable decoy has no business reason and can be treated as hostile. CounterCraft turns those touches into adversary-generated intelligence your SOC can act on before the attack moves to discovery or lateral movement.
Most organizations never see reconnaissance happening. Reconnaissance in cybersecurity happens before the malware, before the brute force attempts, before anything that sets off your usual alarms. An attacker is simply watching, scanning your public websites, scraping LinkedIn for employee names, checking which services you expose to the internet, even figuring out how your email addresses are formatted. MITRE ATT&CK labels this as Reconnaissance (TA0043), and it’s exactly what it sounds like: an adversary gathering everything they need to build an accurate map of your organization. That can be staff details, exposed services, forgotten subdomains, and even how your email addresses are built. Once they have that information, every step that follows becomes cheaper for them and harder for you.
CISA’s 2024 Federal Government Cybersecurity Incident and Vulnerability Response Playbooks tell defenders to act here, in this early phase, not only when an intrusion is confirmed. That is where deception fits. It gives the attacker something believable to touch, and it gives you a clear signal the moment they do.
Reconnaissance in Cybersecurity, Defined
Reconnaissance in cybersecurity is the deliberate collection of information about a target organization, its people, and its infrastructure by adversaries to design more effective intrusions. MITRE’s TA0043 tactic lists some of these techniques, including gathering victim identity information, searching open websites/domains, and phishing for information by exploiting human vulnerabilities. The attacker is not improvising. They are building a map that will support initial access and later lateral movement.
What makes this phase tricky is that most of it happens outside your endpoints. A scan of your VPN portal looks like typical internet noise, a LinkedIn scrape looks like ordinary traffic, and a single “can I confirm your email domain” phish looks like a mistake. Yet if you let these actions complete, the attacker now knows:
Which remote services you expose.
Which identity formats you use.
Which technologies are likely to be present internally.
Which user roles are worth targeting.
That is why, whenever your SOC sees reconnaissance activity, the question should be: ‘What did the attacker just learn about us?’
How Adversaries Build Their Recon Picture : TA0043 in Practice
Attackers work in layers, starting wide and then getting more precise with the information they collect along the way.
First, the adversary looks at everything you make public. Corporate websites, product pages, support portals, job adverts, GitHub repos, and even partner pages all reveal technology choices and deployment patterns. MITRE models this as T1593 because attackers know that public material is often ahead of security documentation.
Second, they enumerate people. They collect names, roles, locations, and email formats to engineer trust and exploit human vulnerabilities. This powers business email compromise and targeted phishing for information, because the messages now look like they come from someone real. It is still reconnaissance because they are not delivering malware yet.
Third, they start active network reconnaissance. They scan for open ports, remote access, admin consoles, orphaned subdomains, and cloud buckets. This step is easiest to detect yet most teams miss it because it arrives without context and looks unimportant.
Finally, mature actors have automated this process. CISA notes that standardized response procedures work best when detections are consistent, which is exactly what automated recon is trying to defeat. Deception restores that consistency.
Why Your Current Stack Does Not See Early Recon
Here is the pattern we are seeing across enterprises.
- Firewalls and WAFs log scanners, but security teams suppress most of it to keep daily alert volume down.
- EDR/XDR focus on execution on endpoints. Reconnaissance happens before an endpoint is touched.
- External attack surface tools tell you what is exposed, but not who is touching it right now.
- TI feeds tell you what other people have seen, not what someone is doing to you right now.
That is why NIST SP 800-61r3 and the 2024 CISA playbooks both say incident handlers should detect and analyze as early as possible, not only after impact. They recognize that small, preparatory events can be the first sign of a serious campaign.
Our recently published blog on malware analysis makes the same point in another context. Traditional sandboxing sees the first thing, but not all the secondary action that unfolds. Attackers wait until they believe they are in a real environment before showing their playbook. Reconnaissance works the same way. If you do not control what they see first, you only see them when it is too late.
Deception: How to Blind or Corrupt Reconnaissance
This is where CounterCraft changes the game with deception technology. Instead of letting the adversary roam around production, you place a digital twin version of your organization that you built for the sole purpose of being watched. From the attacker’s side it looks exactly like what they were hoping to find, a remote access portal that matches your naming, an admin panel with the right login path, or a file share with realistic folder names and user trails. The replicated environment passes the basic authenticity checks, so they keep going.
From the SOC’s side it is completely different. This environment has no business users and no legitimate traffic, so every touch is hostile, every request is interesting, and every action can be tagged to MITRE ATT&CK before it even reaches SIEM or SOAR. That is why the signal is so clean. You do not need to ask “is this real,” you can go straight to “what was the actor trying to do and how do we block it everywhere else.”
You do not need to ask “is this real,” you can go straight to “what was the actor trying to do and how do we block it everywhere else.”
A deception-led reconnaissance prevention campaign created with CounterCraft technology could look like this:
- Publish believable external decoys.
You expose VPN, web, admin or OT lookalikes that match your naming and technology choices. Any scanner or enumerator that touches these is doing reconnaissance in cybersecurity, not business activity. This mirrors how your session hijacking blog publishes instrumented OAuth lookalikes. - Seed discovery paths with honeytokens.
You place fake credentials, fake internal URLs, and fake cloud objects in places recon actors are likely to reach. If they harvest them and later use them, you have a clean, ATT&CK mapped alert. - Capture behavior inside digital twins.
If the attacker proceeds, you hold them inside a realistic, isolated environment. That lets you watch lateral movement techniques in a safe space, exactly like your malware sandboxing post where the attacker thinks they hit the real thing. - Send everything to SIEM/SOAR already tagged.
Because no one should touch these assets, the events can be sent straight to SIEM or SOAR. You can pre-label them with MITRE ATT&CK TA0043, and if the intruder tries credentials, you can add discovery or lateral movement IDs. This matches CISA’s guidance for standardized response and makes the alert immediately actionable.
Now the attacker’s map is wrong. If they come back and try to move, they will move inside the deception environment. That is how you blind reconnaissance without blocking the internet.
Outcomes the CISO Can Report
Deception gives you a way to defend against reconnaissance by turning the attacker’s curiosity into your visibility. Because the assets are believable but have no business use, any interaction with them is hostile, and the SOC does not need to waste time deciding if it is real. That interaction immediately produces adversary-generated threat intelligence, not recycled indicators, so CISOs see what a real intruder did against their environment, with their naming conventions and their exposed services.
Telemetry is tagged to MITRE ATT&CK as it arrives, which makes executive and regulatory reporting cleaner and keeps security operations aligned with frameworks like CISA’s incident playbooks. Most importantly, deception quietly breaks the attacker’s plan. If their reconnaissance is based on decoys, their discovery and lateral movement stay in decoys, which reduces risk to production and gives the CISO something very practical to say to the business: we saw the attacker early, we controlled what they saw, and we have the evidence.
AI Summary
Stop Reconnaissance Before First Touch
CounterCraft delivers deception-powered threat intelligence that makes reconnaissance in cybersecurity visible, high fidelity and immediately actionable by presenting attackers with believable decoys, digital twins and seeded credentials that have zero business traffic, so every touch is hostile and already mapped to MITRE ATT&CK for fast SIEM and SOAR response. To see how this turns quiet external recon into organization specific intel your SOC can act on, schedule a personalized CounterCraft demo.
