Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Online reward programs are a "bonanza", "gold mine" for criminals, where they can have a "field day", "orgy", "spree", ... consisting of "binging" on personal information. Let's keep "honeypot" what it has come to be, though, in connection with computer security.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_(computing)

A honeypot is a decoy used to attract malicious activity, keeping it from legitimate targets, and accurately identifying it.

Honeypots are deliberately promoted in such a way that legitimate users will not find them, but criminals will end up harvesting their addresses. For instance a honeypot e-mail address wouldn't be offered to legitimate users as a contact, but only buried in some content where only a spammer will harvest it. When the criminal uses the decoy identifier, their connection attempts are subject to time-wasting pauses (the honeypot is "sticky"!), and their IP address is put into a blacklist at the same time, so then the have a hard time accessing non-decoy resources.

"Honey pot" as a metaphor existed long before this. Just because in your life's context the security-related is more dominant doesn't mean the dozen other uses of "honey pot" need to be let go of.

What you're suggesting isn't "let's keep...", since at no point in time it exclusively meant that one thing.

When I read the title, I read it as though these reward programs were stings used to catch black hat Hackers. The purpose of language is to communicate meaning and this headline fails to do so properly.

Depends who the audience is.

Honey pot is defined as an enticing source of pleasure or reward.

So the title works for the non techy.

I really get tired of non-security people entering a security discussion to redefine known security terms to fit some irrelevant personal emotional familiarity. Worse is when you point that out suddenly people are somehow greatly offended.

The way the term is used is correct in the article. Security people use based on the common definition, it's just in security it is assumed that it is with the intent of trapping the person going for the honey.

I agree that domain specific terminology, general language and another domain's language is confusing.

I'm sure a developer at a toy company and management could get confused by a conversation about models.

Doesn't mean either of them are right. Language is frequently ambiguous and we avoid it internally in our domains where possible.

It has a known meaning for computer security and the article is about computer security.

It's the NYT, not HN, but still they used the phrase 'honey pot for hackers'. The 'for hackers' part is what makes the whole phrase misleading. It's as if they said "Physicist says gravity is only a theory": A physicist would never use the word 'only' there, even though a non-scientist might. The word 'theory' means something very specific to a scientist but its meaning is a lot looser to a lay person.

Can you show an example? Because I've never heard of any other usage of the term.

Honey pot (and honey trap) have been used in espionage, and related fiction, where a target is seduced sexually. The infosec version of this is essentially the same approach though.

Also it's been used to describe vaginas and male sex toys.

noun: honey-pot

1.

  - a container for honey. "an earthenware honeypot"
  - an enticing source of pleasure or reward. "massive increases in government -- purchases became a honeypot for the unscrupulous"
  - a place to which many people are attracted. "the tourist honeypot of St Ives"

2. VULGAR SLANG

  - a woman's genitals

I guess the definition we are used to is the metaphor "an enticing source of pleasure or reward."

But with the added nuance that you're intention is to trap the enticed in honey...

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