Honeypot

In terms of cybersecurity, honeypot is defined as a program intentionally created to attract attacks to deflect or study real ones.

This is accomplished by helping counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems.

As such, a honeypot consists of data that appears to be a legitimate part of the site and seems to contain information or a resource of value to attackers.

In actuality, this data isolated and monitored, facilitating the blocking or analyzing of the attacking entity.

This level of baiting has gained notoriety in the crypto space in recent years.

In certain instances, some users have actually taken this one step further, relying on honeypots to trick would-be thieves into losing some of their own cryptocurrency.

Honeypots are also known as honeynets, which rely on a counterfeited network to lure other cyber criminals.

In this sense, scammers can also install fake websites of their own to trick inexperienced crypto investors.

What are Examples of Honeypots?

One famous incidence of this occurred in April of 2018, when an anonymous publicly posted their private key to a MyEtherWallet in a public chatroom.

Inside of the wallet lay $5000 worth of ‘Minereum,’ (MNE) the native token of a blockchain network that describes itself as “the first self-mining smart contract.”

However, the wallet didn’t have a single shred of ETH to pay for the ‘gas’ necessary to process transactions on the Ethereum network.

Therefore, in order to successfully extract the MNE tokens, the thieves needed to send ‘gas’ in the form of ETH tokens.

What they didn’t know was that the mastermind behind the scheme had coded a script that automatically sent the incoming ETH to another address.