The Importance of Network Traffic Analysis

Unlimited information exchange is one of the most significant results of today’s advancing computing and information technologies. The world becomes smaller, as people get more connected every day. This evolution has brought many benefits to our society when it comes to information dissemination, international cooperation, business opportunities and more. Unfortunately, these advantages bring with them serious security threats.

Information can be disseminated through unsecure avenues because anyone with basic knowledge of computers and internet computing can easily share information online. The various technological innovations have also given birth to a new generation of hackers, whose main objective is to steal and trade valuable information either for money or political purposes. This is why many companies have started to secure their firewalls, update their anti-malware software, and invest in a network security solutions.

Recent trends in cyber security showed that threats could be spotted and eliminated effectively with the use of network-centric attack detection technologies. In this article, we discuss how network traffic analysis helps in warding off different cyber-attacks.

Uses Behavioral Patterns to Spot Suspicious Activities

Traffic analysis is the process by which messages are intercepted and examined for the purpose of performance, security, and general network operation. By reviewing, recording, and analyzing the flow of information between two hosts, the company is able to provide a baseline behavior pattern. Once they are familiar with the baseline use of the network, administrators can easily catch anomalies such as significant increases in bandwidth use, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and other irregularities that may indicate that a company’s network security has been compromised.

Helps Pinpoint Invisible Threats

Hackers can access company networks in many ways. For example, they can send malicious emails to all your contacts in order to spread malware such as viruses and spyware. Sometimes, all it takes is one infected laptop or USB drive to compromise the entire network.

Once they get inside, hackers can disable anti-virus software or use the device as springboard to launch more attacks on other users. The more sophisticated hackers have the ability to design malwares that can easily spread throughout the network and function in a way that they are regarded as legitimate programs.

Network traffic analysis helps in monitoring all activities within the network, not just at the perimeter, but also between endpoints and servers. This way, companies can identify the source from any endpoint that was responsible for ongoing cyber attacks.

Minimizes Damage and Profit-loss

Hackers have the ability to get into a company’s network, no matter how impenetrable it may seem. Taking preventive measures to defend your data is not enough. The only way to minimize the damage and avoid huge profit loss is to detect cyber threats within the system, pinpoint where they’re coming from, and effectively terminate and stop the attacks. While log-based user behavior analytics (UBA) may help in investigating anomalies, they take a longer time in analyzing the log messages, enabling the hackers to acquire more sensitive data.

Network traffic analysis detects the hacker’s actions once they have penetrated the network and are currently trying to steal data. It helps discover threats faster, thus decreasing the time between infection and resolution, and lowering the cost of data breach for most companies.

Hackers are getting more creative and daring when it comes to finding new ways to breach company networks. They can implant malware that can go undetected for several years, enabling them to acquire stolen data continuously. Instead of finding ways to prevent hackers from getting into their systems, companies should invest more in thinking how they can slow these hackers down. Network traffic analysis is an effective tool in making extracting data harder for hackers. It helps the company detect cyber threats with a higher degree of certainty, thereby enabling them to eliminate security threats better and faster.