Network is the fundamental infrastructure of every business. It connects a company’s users, devices, and applications physically or wirelessly, transmitting data from one point to another. Ensuring its security, performance, and efficiency is paramount. This is where network traffic analysis comes into play.
Network traffic analysis (NTA) is the method of monitoring network traffic activity using machine learning (ML), rule-based detections, and behavior modeling to find any issues or potential IT problems.
System administrators and network engineers use network traffic analysis software and network detection and response (NDR) solutions to monitor enterprise network traffic for security threats and network issues like slow download speeds or throughput. These tools track, record and analyze network traffic patterns and compare them with established benchmarks to identify anomalies.
Let’s learn more about its importance, processes, and benefits.
Every enterprise-level application ultimately depends on the network to function. User devices’, be it employees or customers, need to communicate with different types of servers, like the web server and the DNS server. The web server must communicate with the company’s database and dedicated storage area network (SAN). All of these communications require the network to be functional and not overloaded. Gaining insights into network traffic helps manage this easily.
Further, NTA has major security benefits. Major criminal intrusion incidents like data breaches and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks can be detected by abnormal traffic that should not be on the network or an unusually high amount of traffic. NTA flags these “out of normal” traffic conditions.
This helps network administrators take action to thwart or significantly reduce damages from cyber attacks. Overall, NTA provides valuable insights into network behavior and enables organizations to make informed decisions to protect their network infrastructure and data.
NTA involves data collection, preprocessing, traffic analysis, visualization, and reporting. Here’s a detailed overview of how NTA works.
The first step of NTA is collecting network telemetry, i.e., all network traffic data from devices on an enterprise network. This includes:
In the next step, the collected network traffic data is aggregated and processed to extract useful metadata like the source and destination IP addresses, ports, traffic protocols, traffic volume, etc.
For instance, flow data is aggregated and analyzed to understand traffic patterns, volume, and duration. Packet-level data may be processed to extract specific details, packet size, packet signature, and packet header info like the source address, protocol, port number, etc.
Once the data is processed, the following three techniques are applied to gain insights from the collected network traffic data:
This technique establishes a baseline of normal network behavior and detects deviations from this baseline. It looks for unusual traffic patterns, high traffic volumes from specific sources, unexpected protocols or ports, or other abnormal network behavior that may indicate a security threat.
This well-established intrusion detection technique compares network traffic data against known patterns (signatures) from previously detected threats, malware, or attack techniques. The signature-based analysis is effective against a known attack but makes it difficult to detect new attacks.
The major advantage of modern NTA tools is the use of ML algorithms to analyze network traffic. ML models are trained on historical network traffic data to identify patterns and detect anomalies and potentially malicious activities.
The power of ML for NTA lies in detecting and analyzing network attacks even when they have not been explicitly defined or described beforehand. It can recognize patterns that predefined signatures or baseline-based techniques may not capture and identify any suspicious activity.
The analyzed data is shown in charts, graphs, dashboards, or reports, providing a clear overview of network activity and security events. NTA tools also generate alerts based on predefined rules.
For instance, an alert can be triggered if an application's traffic exceeds a certain bandwidth usage or a user accesses sensitive data outside work hours. These alerts can be integrated with other security tools to facilitate incident response.
NDR tools, which evolved from NTA to include threat response capabilities, provide this feature of automating threat response through intelligent integrations with tools like:
Implementing NTA helps network administrators improve the management of network resources, optimize network performance, minimize the attack surface, and, most importantly, enhance security. The advantages of NTA include the following.
The rising trend of cloud adoption, remote work, and buying-your-own device (BYOD) has created visibility gaps in enterprise networks. NTA addresses this by collecting and analyzing real-time data on east-west (internal network traffic) and north-south traffic (traffic in and out of the enterprise network).
NTA tools monitor and track traditional data packets in the network, and virtual network traffic, cloud workloads, application programming interface ( API) calls to SaaS applications, serverless computing instances, and other forms of network communications.
This provides IT teams greater visibility and a complete picture of activity from layers 2 to 7 of the open system interconnection (OSI) network connectivity model, eliminating any blind spots.
NTA provides a good overview of network availability, uptime, and downtime. This helps the IT team evaluate the quality of service (QOS) and quickly troubleshoot network availability issues like slow response times, packet loss, or network congestion.
NTA also aids organizations in monitoring bandwidth usage and identifying users, applications, protocols, and IP address groups that consume the most bandwidth. This can highlight issues with bandwidth allocation affecting network performance.
For instance, businesses can identify applications that need more bandwidth and network resources that need to be completely shut down to avoid wastage with NTA. An added benefit of NTA is predicting future traffic trends based on historical data. This helps with planning bandwidth allocation and congestion control of network traffic.
NTA is an essential component of network security. Most NTA solutions have pre-defined algorithms that automatically alert any suspicious network activity based on traffic data. Such alerts can accurately pinpoint targeted attacks, malicious insiders, and compromised endpoints in a network.
Security teams can rapidly confirm and block network threats by reviewing these alerts before damage occurs. This reduces the mean time to respond (MTTR) and the potential damage from security incidents like DDoS attacks, malware infection, data exfiltration attempts, and attackers' lateral movement in the network.
The practice of collecting and analyzing network data has been around since 1988, when the first packet data analyzer, tcpdump, was released. Traditionally, network administrators monitored a small network with limited bandwidth. System administrators used network flow monitoring protocols like NetFlow and packet capturing to perform NTA and improve network performance.
But today, the enterprise network infrastructure has become a different beast altogether, relying heavily on the internet, high-speed lines, and cloud applications. Despite encryption, firewalls, and other security measures, organizations are still vulnerable to security threats like zero-day attacks, ransomware, DDoS attacks, and malware infections.
The real-time examination of network traffic becomes essential to accurately detect threats early. Modern NTA solutions address this need. They go beyond flow data analysis and packet capturing to deep packet inspection and advanced ML-based analysis for advanced threat detection.
Further, NDR solutions combine the functionality of many other network security solutions to offer threat intelligence, incidence response, and network forensics.
Three major challenges businesses face when implementing NTA:
Choosing the right NTA tools with the correct features is important to address these challenges efficiently. To help with this, we have compiled the best NTA tools and features businesses should look for when selecting NTA tools below.
Two sets of software help with NTA, as mentioned earlier–NTA and NDR platforms. While NTA offers great visibility into network traffic patterns and performance, NDR goes a step further and provides advanced threat detection and response capabilities. Based on the organization's needs, budget, and resources, any of these two solutions can be chosen for NTA.
The modern NTA solutions are designed to analyze network traffic patterns, flow, and behavior to gain insights into network performance, security, and troubleshooting.
*Above are the five leading NTA solutions from G2’s Summer 2023 Grid® Report.
NDR is a more comprehensive network security solution than NTA tools. It uses ML and non-signature-based techniques to detect threats that other security tools might miss.
*Above are the six leading NDR solutions from G2’s Summer 2023 Grid® Report.
Network monitoring solutions are another software category closely overlapping with NTA and NDR. However, it doesn't offer the same level of detail on network activity and features related to encrypted traffic analysis or behavioral analysis that NTA and NDR provide.
Without NTA tools, businesses cannot see their network performance and detect threats infiltrating their networks in real time. Here are the features businesses should consider in their NTA tools
Based on reviews on G2, our users focus the most on these popular features when picking NDR tools:
Today, NTA stands as a critical pillar of modern cybersecurity. By monitoring, analyzing, and interpreting the vast flows of data traversing networks, NTA empowers organizations to strengthen their security posture and safeguard their critical assets. So, embrace the power of NTA and navigate the digital highways with confidence.
Looking to learn more? Explore what network access control is and how it strengthens network security.
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