There’s a famous scene in the film Enter the Dragon (1973) where Bruce Lee’s character chases an enemy into a room of mirrors but cannot fight him: he is increasingly frustrated and unable to identify the real foe from the decoys.
Now imagine this tactic applied to cybersecurity: where perfect replicas of systems are presented as targets, fooling cybercriminals into attacking virtual models.
This so-called honeypot—traps designed to draw attackers away from the real thing—is increasingly becoming a reality. And while a hall of mirrors won’t necessarily allow organizations to eliminate cybercrime, it can give an otherwise impossible level of insight: learning what the attackers are after, how they operate, and what weaknesses they’ve exploited to get in.
And even more importantly, these ghost versions can register the attack and protect the real thing, warning the security team to the threat at hand.
This is just one of a number of cybersecurity benefits that are increasingly becoming a reality with the rapid integration of digital twins into cybersecurity.
Sadly it’s not all magical armor for companies: a digital twin may also expose an additional attack surface to criminals, and in today’s edition of The PTP Report, we consider both: how digital twins are exploding, ways they must be accounted for by security teams, and the benefits they provide both now and into the future for cyber defense strategies.
The State of Digital Twins
A digital twin is more than just a virtual copy of a real thing, it’s high-fidelity, augmented by real-time data (often with a two-way flow between the model and the real). And it evolves over time, like the real thing.
Digital twins have all manner of uses, and likely originated in the current form with NASA’s work to simulate, monitor, and t