How do data packets expose network attack DNA?

Introduction

In a world where cybercrime is becoming more and more prevalent, hindsight is really a great thing, and perhaps a company’s most powerful weapon. When investigating a cyber attack incident, information security analysts often need to collect data from a variety of sources to reconstruct the incident, including log files, high-level network traffic (NetFlow) and multiple different security monitoring tools.

In cyber attack incidents, it is most important to quickly and accurately quantify the impact of the incident. As several recent high-profile data breaches have demonstrated, the inability to quickly and accurately understand and communicate cyberattacks can have a catastrophic impact on customer trust, brand loyalty, and ultimately the bottom line.

Today, as cybercrime becomes more and more prevalent, hindsight is really a great thing, and perhaps the most powerful weapon for a company. When investigating a cyber attack incident, information security analysts often need to collect data from a variety of sources to reconstruct the incident, including log files, high-level network traffic (NetFlow) and multiple different security monitoring tools. As you can imagine, this can be a maddeningly slow and often ineffective process. As a result, enterprises often accumulate a large number of unresolved events and continue to form unknown threats.

Successfully handling an attack means being able to quickly understand when and how the attack occurred, identify the vulnerabilities through which the attacker entered the company's systems, and identify the data and systems that may have been leaked or destroyed. This is critical to protecting your company’s cybersecurity.

Without this level of network visibility, companies have little opportunity to respond appropriately to attacks or prevent future attacks. This is where raw data logging comes in: But what exactly does raw data logging involve? How can it help global companies?

Assess your network traffic

Communications between various components in the infrastructure, such as servers, desktop systems, laptops, and mobile devices, are captured as a stream of network "packets." These data contain various raw information, such as traffic source, destination flow, transmitted "payload"-actual data, etc.

The data packet is equivalent to the "sole source of truth", which has two benefits:
1. Obtain comprehensive information sources of original data for cybersecurity incident investigation;
2. Review data from a performance perspective to identify and resolve issues that may impact performance.

Two typical application scenarios are as follows:

Scenario 1: It has been compromised and it is time to warn customers of the fact that their data security has been compromised.
On the plus side, having 1 month of raw network data to analyze allows you to describe the problem more specifically, rather than just saying "We've been compromised, customer caution!" You can find out The exact time of the incident, the extent of the attacker's intrusion into the network; it can also be determined whether the attacker has done any "reconnaissance" operations before the invasion, what specific data was stolen, how and where the data was exfiltrated, etc.
This is a powerful subset of information to use when communicating with customers and can help build more robust security.

Scenario 2: A serious performance failure occurs in your network, which even affects the provision of services to customers.
If the problem isn't with your ISP, it's probably not an issue with your network. By analyzing packets, organizations can often quickly identify and fix common performance issues. For example, issues such as how the application interoperates with a given database.

Integration is key

Companies have several security solutions, often making it difficult to obtain a unified and coherent view of threats and activity on the network. This shows that we need better integration.

The integration process does not necessarily have to be complex, nor does it necessarily involve the deployment and implementation of new infrastructure. By integrating network logging capabilities into existing tools, analysts can move directly from alerts in those tools to examining the underlying packet-level network history to see what specific transactions occurred on the network. This streamlines and smoothes investigations, helping analysts remove false positives and identify, prioritize and respond to real threats faster.

In the fight against cybercrime and the competition to win market share with top performance, companies do not need to reinvent the wheel or become experts in network DNA sequencing. Having the raw data that holds the answers to many of today's data breaches and performance issues gives companies a huge advantage in quickly leveraging hindsight and remediating security vulnerabilities and performance issues more quickly.

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