recognizing-deception

Guidance for recognizing defensive traps during an authorized security engagement. These traps include fake credentials, decoy accounts or files, and honeypots that alert defenders when touched.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before acting on uncertain keys, tokens, accounts, documents, or other access found during authorized testing, especially in environments using deception tools.
Why use it?
Using a planted credential or opening a decoy file can reveal the engagement and trigger an alert. The guidance helps distinguish suspicious items by checking where access and credentials came from.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/evilfreelancer/secs/recognizing-deception
Any agent
npx skills add EvilFreelancer/secs --skill recognizing-deception
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/EvilFreelancer/secs

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 119 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,494 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00119 $0.01494
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.00747
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00299
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00149

Measured 3d ago against content hash 8b04a8acdc29, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

recognizing-deception scanned grade C with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Reaches for credential fileshighPrivilege escalation

SSH keys, cloud credentials, git-credentials, .npmrc, /etc/shadow: reading these is how a config file becomes a credential leak.

| Canary credential (AWS/Slack/kube/Azure cert) | Valid **format** but tied to no real identity; sitting in `~/.aws/credentials`, a repo `.env`, `/root/.kube/config`; never appears in prior legitimate API/auth logs |
.agents/skills/recognizing-deception/SKILL.md · 100 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 100 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Recognizing Deception

Modern defenders plant tripwires whose only purpose is to fire when an intruder touches them: a credential that has no legitimate use, an account that never logs on, a document that phones home when opened. Because they have zero legitimate use, any interaction is a definitive, high-fidelity compromise alert — which makes them the cheapest way for a blue team to catch a red team. Recognizing them is an OPSEC skill: the goal is not to disarm the defense but to avoid stepping on it and burning the engagement. The core instinct is provenance. Access you cannot attribute to a specific step you took is a trap until proven otherwise.

This skill is advisory judgement layered over other work — it does not add target interaction beyond what you are already authorized to do. It pairs tightly with credential provenance in maintaining-engagement-state: log where every credential and access came from, so "I don't know where this came from" becomes a visible stop signal rather than a shrug.

When to Use

  • Before acting on found credentials, keys, or tokens of uncertain origin
  • Before Kerberoasting or AS-REP roasting an account that looks conveniently exposed
  • Before opening an enticingly-named file or browsing a suspiciously discoverable share
  • Before using an AWS/Slack/kube credential discovered in a repo or on a host
  • Any time access appears without a step you can point to that produced it

When NOT to Use

  • Deploying deception as the defender — that is the inverse discipline and is out of scope here
  • Recording where a credential came from — use maintaining-engagement-state; this skill decides whether to trust it, that one stores the provenance
  • The active AD attack itself — use attacking-active-directory; consult this skill before you pull the trigger
  • Password attacks on a hash you already hold — use cracking-passwords; check the account is not bait first
  • Cloud credential abuse — use exploiting-cloud-platforms; validate the key is not a canary first

Read the full file on GitHub · 100 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 100 lines · 119 tokens per session scan C 8b04a8acdc29

Subscribe to this mod's changes

recognizing-deception is a skill published in the GitHub repository EvilFreelancer/secs (10 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 119 tokens to every session and 1,494 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (reaches for credential files). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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