Network Visibility 101: What You Need to Know

Why network visibility is an increasingly vital cybersecurity capability?

As cyberattacks grow more sophisticated, the limitations of endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems have become clearer. EDR provides deep insights into individual hosts — or “depth” — but lacks a broad view of network activities between hosts —“breadth”— and cybercriminals are increasingly aware of this gap. After breaching an organization's defenses, these adversaries begin navigating the network to achieve their objectives (such as deploying malware or exfiltrating data) while aiming to dwell and remain undetected.

As EDR deployments increase and improve visibility into endpoints, adversaries are discovering novel workarounds. They’ve shifted their attention to areas such as OT/ICS, IoT devices, VPNs, virtualization platforms, firewalls, email filters, and cloud services that typically fall below the radar of traditional cybersecurity measures.

Fortunately, network visibility tools provide solutions in the current threat landscape. First, any movement by attackers within the network leaves behind evidence, enabling organizations with advanced visibility tools and processes in place to understand their actions. Second, the reach of network monitoring has broadened to allow continuous monitoring of operational technology (OT), industrial control systems (ICS), uniform visibility into the cloud, and other advances.

However, the goal isn't just to observe. Network visibility provides crucial detections and insights that enable organizations to thwart attacks before they escalate into devastating breaches. And as networks grow increasingly complex and hybrid, cybersecurity teams can't afford to overlook evidence critical to identifying indicators of compromise. Missing such evidence diminishes their ability to mitigate or prevent serious damage. For these reasons, network visibility is seen as an increasingly vital capability and essential component for any serious SOC.

Network-focused security has also evolved over the past decade. Network detection and response (NDR) has emerged as a leading solution that offers the extensive breadth of visibility required to defend against advanced attacks. By using NDR in conjunction with EDR (two of the three elements in the SOC Visibility Triad), cybersecurity teams can gain comprehensive visibility into endpoints and network activity, and improve their ability to detect the stealthiest and most sophisticated cyberattacks.

What does network visibility mean to your team?

In practice, network visibility is a function of role and capabilities. Individuals and teams tasked with maintaining optimal connectivity and performance will visualize the network from a different point of view than compliance officers or security professionals.

Whatever an individual's or team's mandate might be, their visibility capacity depends on harnessing the tools that monitor network connections and activity, providing some measure of breadth and depth.

While it may seem logical that complete visibility and total access to network traffic would simplify security professionals’ workflows, most recognize that visualizing and analyzing all of their organization's traffic is impractical. So, network visibility is also a function of selection and synthesis.

A SOC depends on logs, processes, and tools that allow for efficient capturing, copying, configuring, and displaying of data packets.

Use cases for network visibility

Network visibility can bolster every aspect of the organization’s security posture across the cyber kill chain, from reconnaissance to digital forensics and incident response (DFIR). Comprehensive visibility also allows experienced security teams to baseline their network’s normal behavior and shift to threat hunting exercises to supplement preventative tools that are never entirely foolproof.

Organizations that lack network visibility make it more difficult for IT technicians, risk managers, and security teams to do their jobs. Misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, shadow IT, and improper usage can go unchecked and lead to work slowdowns, regulatory noncompliance, and security breaches.

The network is not static, and maintaining comprehensive visibility is an ongoing and imperfect process. But security teams can always find ways to improve their processes of monitoring the network, and advanced security solutions can assist in maintaining a scalable and adaptable view of evolving digital infrastructure.

The role of visibility in a resilient SOC

“You can’t protect what you can’t see” remains a core cyberdefense principle. To be resilient in the face of evolving threats and capable of timely, effective incident response, SOCs must take a systematic approach to ensure they have visibility that is sufficiently broad and deep, focused on both north-south as well as east-west traffic.

Mapping an organization’s assets is important, but it’s just the base layer of visibility. Proficient SOCs also need to monitor the applications and protocols in use, all network connections and components, data storage solutions and transport methods, and have a working sense of network traffic patterns. Many organizations must also monitor fleets of IoT and edge computing devices, or dynamic arrays of transiently connected devices (such as those found in university settings) that lack many of the security features of traditional endpoints.

Building a comprehensive view of the digital ecosystem means collecting data from a wide range of sources. It typically entails using network traffic flow logs, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), data from network infrastructure such as firewalls, cloud logs, VPN logs, and other data sources that are useful to IT teams monitoring network functionality, as well as security teams.

Traditionally, security efforts have focused on external-to-internal, north-south traffic, and monitoring perimeter defenses. As organizations have become aware of insider threats and gravitated towards security frameworks that presume a breach has already occurred, monitoring lateral movement has become a necessity. Since lateral traffic typically moves at much higher volumes, security teams need tools that synthesize and package evidence without generating excessive alerts.

The SOC will also depend on the visibility provided by security-focused tools, such as EDR, SIEM, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and network system monitoring platforms such as NDR. As more network traffic becomes encrypted, many SOCs require tools that can analyze observable aspects of that traffic, such as timestamps and packet sizes, to avoid creating significant visibility gaps.

In practice, however, visibility largely depends on the scope and capability of the tools used. An organization that relies on EDR, a SIEM and some form of IDS will likely define network visibility in terms of what its security stack can monitor. This may be much less than the totality of what comprises the network and its connections, leaving unmonitored areas that remain vulnerable.

Ways to improve network visibility

Remote and hybrid environments, the proliferation of endpoints — including those in OT, ICS, and ephemeral cloud infrastructure — are several factors that make it more difficult to achieve and sustain a complete picture of an organization’s digital ecosystem. Like visibility itself, a lack of visibility may be sourced to more than one condition a security team may or may not recognize. Listed below are several approaches to mitigate these challenges and boost visibility.

Improve network visibility by:

Tactic	DETAILS
Adding network monitoring to expand coverage	Many organizations map and protect their endpoints with EDR. While EDR provides in-depth monitoring of activity on the endpoint, it offers a limited view of the network itself. To monitor and protect the wide expanses of network infrastructure and cloud environments that add to the overall attack surface, using additional solutions designed specifically for network monitoring can add the necessary breadth and visibility. These solutions enable comprehensive oversight across on-premises systems and hybrid and multi-cloud setups, improving overall security posture.
Accessing richer data resources	Security teams that rely on NetFlow, default cloud logs, and NGFW logs may gain basic context and some insight into network activity. However, these solutions are often lacking the detail and features SOCs need to erase blind spots, gain an in-depth understanding of normal network activity, and identify evidence of stealthy attackers evading intrusion prevention tools. Solutions such as Open NDR provide both comprehensive visibility and data about crucial connections, offering log context and detail to streamline investigations and enhance overall network activity awareness.
Tracking unmanaged devices and entities	Dynamic environments often have unknown IoT and personal devices and unmanaged entities traversing the network. These, along with shadow IT apps, often aren't on the radar of traditional endpoint management systems and perimeter defenses. Many also aren’t enabled with standard protections or operate beyond the scope of traditional systems and use unusual logging protocols that are difficult to track, making standard protections like EDR insufficient. Network monitoring provides insights into device functionalities, applications, services, certificates, hosts, to more effectively safeguard high-value assets.
Adding visibility into OT/ICS systems	Attacks on OTand ICS can cause significant physical and economic damage. Many of these systems aren’t seen by EDR and remain unmonitored. As such, they’re favored access points for cybercriminals. Enhanced coverage of these systems can identify devices and monitor for uncommon network behavior—such as an HVAC system interacting with a server—which helps in detecting security issues and protecting critical infrastructure.
Gaining insights into encrypted traffic	Encrypted traffic and channels, such as VPNs, are increasingly common features of digital networks and bring many advantages. While these channels are employed by legitimate users, they can also be exploited by malicious actors. SOCs need tools to parse features of encrypted traffic or protocols to better understand normal patterns and identify potentially malicious activity.
Synthesizing data	In complex networks that achieve high visibility, an immense volume of telemetry can be generated — often exceeding what SOCs and their systems can analyze or store. So it’s important to deliberately streamline data collection and choose tools that automatically contextualize details to enhance the efficiency of investigations, and provide manageable summaries fit for human review. This approach helps avoid alert overloads and blind spots, and ensures a more coherent view of the network environment.
Increasing investment	Security teams working with outdated or insufficient monitoring tools may have to over-rely on logs with limited data fields and incomplete views of their infrastructure. Investing in security solutions such as NDR to complement EDR can improve visibility and help to manage and contextualize data streams.

By implementing these steps to improve visibility, security teams can transform their understanding of their networks’ normal activities and infrastructure. When faced with anomalous behaviors or alerts, they’ll be ready to respond with data insights rather than relying on guesswork. And while any degree of visibility is better than none, as increasingly complex networks generate even more types of data many SOCs will find the limited visibility afforded by their current technologies may contribute to unsustainable cyber risk.

How NDR enhances network visibility?

Network detection and response (NDR) is a security solution designed to deliver and harness the benefits of increased visibility. It monitors network traffic via multiple sources, including physical or virtual TAPs, SPAN ports, cloud packet mirrors, firewall logs, and flow records (e.g., NetFlow). Additionally, it can be used to monitor unmanaged devices, entities, and OT/ICS, providing broad-reaching insight to the SOC.

By integrating these various sources, NDR can provide a comprehensive view of both north-south and east-west (lateral) traffic patterns, giving security teams extensive network oversight. Advanced NDR solutions enhance visibility with data analytics and contextualization functions to help surface anomalies and provide teams with a tool to make sense of the activities happening within complex traffic patterns.

NDR Features	Details
Real-time traffic monitoring	NDR transforms network traffic data into actionable security insights, revealing hidden threats and vulnerabilities and exposing attackers’ reconnaissance and escalation activities.
Monitoring multiple environments	Organizations increasingly operate across hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-premises networks. NDR can monitor activity across these environments, as well as VPN channels and other connection points.
ML-based analysis and alerting	Machine learning capability helps scale visibility and network monitoring and keep security teams from being overwhelmed by data. It can also synthesize and summarize alert data to inform analysts and guide their investigations toward credible threats and away from false positives.
Threat intelligence	NDR solutions incorporate known threat signature databases and can align with threat intelligence frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK® to help security teams refine their monitoring approach across networks.
Deep packet inspection	Examining packet contents and metadata helps security teams pick up evidence that may indicate malware, data exfiltration, and other attack patterns, or usage that violates the organization’s policies.
Improved forensics	The network’s immutable record can help security and compliance teams investigate incidents. NDR solutions can facilitate the retrieval and analysis of these records and extend visibility into past operations.
Adaptability	NDR solutions combine monitoring capabilities with flexibility, allowing security teams to extend visibility by integrating with a wide range of security solutions, protocols and network architecture.

How Corelight enhances network visibility?

Corelight’s Open NDR Platform combines a broad range of tools and capabilities designed to deliver complete visibility. We enable you to view every connection by placing out-of-band sensors strategically throughout the network and turn network telemetry into actionable evidence for security teams.

CORELIGHT OPEN NDR PLATFORM

Expand your network visibility through capabilities that include:

Zeek®, often called the “gold standard” of network monitoring, converts network traffic into concise logs security teams can leverage in analysis, threat hunting and alert response.

Intrusion detection and alerting. Suricata’s signature-based alerts work with Zeek to digest alerts and streamline reporting to SIEM, SOAR, XDR, or Corelight’s Investigator platform.

Smart PCAP. Smart PCAP uses rules for capturing the most essential packets from network traffic and streamlines retrievals while extending lookback windows months beyond full packet inspection norms.

Encrypted traffic collection. Corelight NDR enables security teams to bypass decryption by providing rich context and insights into a wide range of encrypted connections, including SSH, VPN, RDP, and DNS.

Advanced analytics. The Corelight NDR platform extensively leverages AI functionality to enrich alerts and streamline reporting, which provides SOCs with more actionable insights into the network and helps reduce threat detection and response times.

Cutting edge threat intelligence. Through a combination of insights from the open-source community and capabilities such as a MITRE ATT&CK navigator, Corelight helps SOCs extend visibility into adversaries’ tactics across the cyber kill chain.

Visibility through integration. Corelight is a trusted partner of many leading security solution providers. Native integrations and technical flexibility make our NDR platform a force multiplier and visibility extender across the security stack.

NETWORK VISIBILITY 101: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

What is network visibility?

Why network visibility is an increasingly vital cybersecurity capability?

What does network visibility mean to your team?

Use cases for network visibility

The role of visibility in a resilient SOC

Ways to improve network visibility

How NDR enhances network visibility?

How Corelight enhances network visibility?

Ready to learn more about how Corelight can improve your network visibility and security preparedness? Contact us today.

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