The IT computing scenario changes faster than ever with expanding infrastructure, evolving technology, and converged communication throughout the world. With that comes the rapidly growing complex network attack environment. The more this technology evolves, the more chances that a network attacker lurks right there in the shadows waiting to wreak havoc. Classic attacks that have been around is one thing to tackle; but timely detection and instantaneous response to new, unknown attacks is a critical need most businesses with IT networks are hungry for.
Dissecting the Insides of a Network Attack
Network attacks make for threats that seem war-like – they are persistent, dangerous and continuous. If there’s a network, attackers have been getting savvier by the day only to attack it. Plenty of movies that show us attackers sabotage a network while a wiry nerd interprets it for the hero. These are good for movies while the reality is different.
The threat comes from the fact that someone is attacking your network as you are reading this and the worst part is that you don’t know a thing about it.
If it weren’t for the fact that most network attacks are abortive or unsuccessful, we would be living in a constant state of chaos. Also, plenty of material along with some great network security products and services produced by active, well-meaning vendors provide you with everything you need to know to set-up a fort-like network, know how to protect it and learn how to remain vigilant at all times.
How do Network Tools Help?
Most network attacks follow certain patterns. When they do occur, there’s a drastic change in the normal network usage statistics. If you’d like to know more about how your network activity looks like, “
Network Monitoring: A Peek into How Your Network Activity Might Look Like?” might be a good place to start from.
Network monitoring tools use a technique called as “Flow Monitoring” which involves gathering data from various devices within a network which is subject to a constant analysis based on a number of specific criteria. You can view these analyses in the form of reports that network management staff, consultants and others concerned with network security constantly peruse through to detect anomalies.
Apart from the basic flow monitoring that most network hardware vendors use, plenty of other advanced flow monitoring tools also exists that render richer functionality and ease of use. Some of these tools can help you to identify and rank excessive bandwidth consumers depending on source, destination and protocol. Some other functions help you with network traffic classification analysed against specific metrics, provide timeline-based reporting and real-time alerting for administrations when flow of network traffic exceeds set thresholds or when approaching critical levels exceeding your maximum network capacity.
Our End-to-end network monitoring solutions --
NCM (Network Central Monitoring) Service provided in our Bronze, Silver and Gold Support variations -- use all of the above approaches to apprehend and contain network attacks together with a paranoid 24 x 7 support. Do feel free to contact us if you’d like to know more about our services and offerings.
Have you taken steps to defend yourself against network attacks?
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