With the growing concern about privacy and security for online services and databases, security engineers are using a series of fake data to catch the errant crackers.

Much of this isn't news or new, but the term "honeytokens" appears to be. Coined earlier this year on a mailing list, it comes from extending the term "honeypot", which is used to describe a computer system that security professionals set up to attract the black hats to their machines for capture.

An article from the New York Times goes into some detail of the uses of these techniques.