Other security software can include honeypots. A honeypot is a decoy, a system that has a number of pieces of software executing on it, such as a web server, FTP server, and so on. The attackers may mistake these servers hosted on a honeypot to be real servers and carry out an attack on it and be identified. This kind of honeypot can be deployed on the network.

There is some research going on into host-based honeypots for protecting against crypto-ransomware. These can be deployed on desktops. Crypto-ransomware usually targets documents such as text, PDF, and Office documents on your system. The honeypots create a folder on the system that has a few documents and can contain other types of files too. We can refer to these as decoy files. The honeypot process always runs its process on the system that keeps an eye on these decoy files. If any process tries to modify any of these files, it can terminate the process or trigger an alert related to the process.