Often these days, we’re asked for a general rule of thumb or guidelines that can help with calculating NetFlow Volume.  How much disk space should an average NetFlow Deployment consume. One of the biggest concerns is that exporting NetFlow (or one of its cousins) for Network Performance Analysis will have a drastic impact on the available bandwidth, CPU overhead on devices, or on the hard drives storing it. This is simply not true.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

We’ve been getting an increasing amount of requests asking how to monitor cloud services, Google Apps for example, and the impact they’re having on the network. In this blog I’ll discuss some of the different methods for identifying how much of your bandwidth is being consumed by Google.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

Since 2005, Plixer and Cisco have been touting NetFlow (not Net Flow) as an IT Security and threat detection solution. Cisco calls NetFlow the “primary network anomaly-detection technology” (pp4) and that “NetFlow allows the user to identify anomalies by producing detailed accounting of traffic flows”.  We are not the only ones with this belief. Even Symantec calls NetFlow a “valuable enhancement” to IDS (intrusion detection) and IPS (intrusion prevention). Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

Possibly the most difficult network malware to detect today is the Advanced Persistent Threat or APT. I’ve also heard them referred to as advanced targeted attacks. Before I digress on how to detect this insidious enigma, I would like to provide some history and clear up some misconceptions about this type of attack.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

I came across this article in infosecisland.com on Securing PCs posted by Michelle Drolet who is the founder and CEO of Towerwall. In the post, she noted several interesting vulnerability facts that most businesses need to be aware of. Right off the top, I found these to be shocking:

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

There are many uses of NetFlow but one of the most important and often overlooked is the network security value NetFlow and IPFIX can provide. Based on feedback gathered over 10 years from hundreds of NetFlow customers, here’s the top five uses of NetFlow analysis for network security in ascending order…
Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

DNSChanger  is a type of DNS Malware  that infected about 4 million PCs computers and many of which (~300,000) are still infected.  Those still unaware of the problem will lose Internet connectivity on Monday July 9th.  More than 100 command and control (C&C) systems have been confiscated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) but, this will not stop the outage.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

Most companies agree that business Internet security systems are a paramount concern.  Relying on traditional security efforts such as firewalls and antivirus software are not going to perform a very important emerging security detection technique called network behavior analysis.  To leverage this internal security measure, network administrators need to collect and analyze NetFlow or IPFIX from existing routers and switches.  And here’s some good news: firmware upgrades are usually not needed to take advantage of flow technology.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!