HoneyPeople is a cyber deception tool developed in collaboration with the University of Trento, with a focus on phishing and social engineering attacks. Artificial intelligence is leveraged to impersonate victims by modeling their personality and organizational role. In addition to the victims, the platform provides a fully programmable environment that includes computing assets (e.g., laptops and servers) and business services such as file storage, email, and CRM systems, on which victims carry out their daily activities.

Within this environment, attackers’ malicious actions and victims’ unaware behaviors coexist, creating a unique scenario that enables the study of tactics, techniques, and procedures across the cyber kill chain.

HoneyPeople has also been used in Capture The Flag competitions, where participants were required to apply social engineering techniques to gain access to the environment, bringing a fresh and innovative perspective to the competition format. Furthermore, HoneyPeople has been employed as an educational tool, allowing students to impersonate attackers in order to increase awareness of phishing campaigns, the techniques employed, and their potential consequences.

Ongoing developments aim to make the environment more dynamic by allowing users to perform realistic business activities, further enhancing realism and better approximating the behavior of a real company or business unit.

The code of HoneyPeople is available on GitLab.