Personalized honeypot for detecting information leaks and security breaches

A honeypot in a computer network is configured for use with a wide variety of computing resources that are defined by a network administrator or user which may include desktop and network resources such as address book contacts, instant messaging contacts, active directory user accounts, IP addresses, and files that contain particular content or that are stored in particular locations. The resources may be real for which protection against leakage is desired, or fake to operate as bait to lure and detect malicious attacks. The honeypot is implemented in an extensible manner so that virtually any resource may be honeypotted to apply honeypot benefits to resources beyond static IP addresses in order to improve both the breadth of information leakage prevention and the detection of malicious attacks.