Police in Austin, Texas, set up sting operations with cars they have under surveillance, watching for thieves to break into them. Marcus J. Carey's Web service, HoneyDocs—born in the same city—uses the same concept, only with computer files.
HoneyDocs is designed to let people know if someone has been snooping around their files. It works by using a Web "bug"—an invisible, 1 x 1 pixel that, if viewed, unnoticeably sends a piece of data back to a server.
Web bugs are used by marketers to see if people have viewed marketing emails. Carey embeds Web bugs into documents, then creates batches of documents that look interesting to hackers, which he calls a "sting."
The documents have teasing file names like "passwords" and "credit cards" but contain plausible yet made-up data. Hackers just won't be able to resist.
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