The modern security stack comprises hundreds of data sources, typically consisting of manageable JSON messages that can be easily aggregated and sent to a security focused data lake for storage and detections. However, there’s a skeleton in the closet: flow logs from sources like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, IBM, and Oracle.
Converting Flow Data into Actionable Intelligence Requires an Innovative Approach
These flow logs are an 800-pound gorilla in the security pipeline. In most cases, the size and volume of flow log data exceed the aggregate volume of all other data sources combined, with the possible exception of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) logs, which are typically managed by proprietary systems. Research shows that flow logs can be orders of magnitude larger than all other log types combined, creating substantial challenges for data wrangling, storage, ingestion, and detections.
When organizations attempt to incorporate flow logs into their security stack, they often encounter severe performance issues. Queries become sluggish, data accessibility becomes inconsistent, and storage and query costs skyrocket, making it an unsustainable approach. The sheer scale of flow logs can bring traditional security systems to a halt, undermining the effectiveness of the entire security infrastructure. The opportunity cost in most cases tends to make flow logs the red-headed stepchild of the security space and in a lot of cases ignored altogether.
Throwing this data away is a terrible idea, but so is one-size-fits-all integration into your stack. The key lies in developing innovative solutions that can handle the scale and complexity of flow log data without compromising performance or incurring prohibitive costs. There are strategies and technologies designed to integrate flow logs efficiently into the security stack, ensuring seamless and cost-effective security observability across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
A Crucial Component of a Comprehensive Security Strategy
Flow logs are a highly valuable security resource when managed effectively. By using advanced analytics and context enrichment, alongside proper storage, threat hunting, and detection techniques, you can significantly enhance your overall security posture. While flow log analysis platforms are not a complete solution on their own, they are a crucial component of a comprehensive security strategy. Services like Netography make it possible for flow logs to be used effectively to boost visibility and response capabilities across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. This approach not only maximizes the utility of flow data but also reduces the operational burden and costs compared to traditional methods.
Many large enterprises resort to dumping their flow logs into something like an S3 bucket, preserving the data indefinitely. This approach, however, renders the data largely useless and unactionable, failing to leverage its potential for enhancing security. Simply storing flow data without transforming and enriching to make it actionable is as ineffective as discarding it.
Unprocessed flow logs naively stored in bulk often do not fit seamlessly into the existing security pipeline due to their immense volume and complexity. This challenge necessitates seeking alternative solutions that can manage and utilize this data effectively. The Fusion platform addresses this issue by enabling the ingestion, enrichment, processing, and analysis of any volume of flow data from any part of your environment.
Taming the 800-pound Gorilla in Your Security Pipeline with Netography Fusion
The Netography Fusion platform excels in transforming the vast potential of flow data into actionable insights. By identifying over 300 security threats in real-time and distilling petabytes of flow data, the Fusion platform converts raw, voluminous logs into meaningful events. You can seamlessly integrate these events into your security pipeline without overwhelming it.
Netography’s approach ensures that your security operations remain efficient and effective, identifying critical issues such as data exfiltration, vulnerable services, ransomware staging, and tracking threat actors across your entire environment. In essence, Fusion harnesses the immense value of flow data— often considered security gold—to provide comprehensive and actionable security insights.
Flow data can reveal a wide range of malicious activity in your network:
- Unauthorized Access Attempts and Lateral Motion: Detects attempts to access restricted areas or unauthorized movement within the network.
- Unusual Communication Patterns: Identifies potential botnet activity through irregular traffic patterns.
- Data Harvesting Before Exfiltration: Spots early signs of large data access or movement that may precede data theft.
- Internal Misuse and Policy Violations: Flags instances of employees violating internal policies or accessing unauthorized resources.
- Communication with Malicious IPs and Domains: Detects connections to known malicious entities.
- Anomalous Behavior Indicating Zero-Day Exploits: Uncovers deviations that indicate zero-day attacks or new threats.
- Network Scanning and Enumeration: Identifies scanning activities used to map and probe the network.
- Unusual Data Transfer Rates and Protocols: Spots abnormal data transfers or uncommon protocol use.
- Application and Service Anomalies: Detects unexpected traffic or behavior related to specific applications or services.
- Configuration Errors and Network Mismanagement: Reveals misconfigurations or errors in the network setup.
Think of Netography Fusion as a flow data compressor and extractor. It takes what appears to be an overwhelming and unmanageable volume of data and extracts the critical insights necessary for improving detections. This process not only enhances your security posture but also optimizes your resources and other security technology deployments, ultimately saving costs. By converting raw flow data into refined, actionable intelligence, Netography ensures that your security pipeline is both more effective and more efficient.
Incident Investigation & The Blast Radius
Once the Fusion portal has detected an anomaly or compromise and sent the relevant information down the pipeline to your SIEM, you can initiate a thorough incident investigation. This threat hunting process is one of the more understated yet innovative ways to understand the events surrounding a security compromise. Netography allows you to replay network interactions, enabling a detailed analysis of what transpired.
For instance, if Fusion detects suspicious activity, you can query Fusion to conduct a threat hunt around the “blast radius” of the incident. This capability is invaluable as it helps determine whether the issue has been contained or if it warrants additional investigation into further actions by the attacker. By leveraging this historical data, your teams can gain confidence in their incident response and containment measures.
In contrast, if you were to discard the data or simply store it as a giant blob on a storage service, it would lose its value. Instead of providing a ROI, this approach results in a significant expense with minimal benefit for security operations. Netography Fusion transforms your raw flow data into actionable intelligence, making it a cost-effective and powerful tool for enhancing your security posture.
Flow Logs: A Valuable Addition to Existing Security Measures
Flow logs are not the end-all to security, but they are a natural fit and valuable addition to existing security systems that offer unparalleled expansion in the scope of observability in any network. Enabling them is straightforward and often takes just minutes, offering a low opportunity cost for gaining visibility and control in areas where deploying traditional deep packet inspection-based network sensors and detection systems is challenging.
However, it’s not necessary to discard other technologies. In sensitive areas with hardware-accelerated decryption or protected zones, conducting packet-based inspection on unencrypted traffic types remains invaluable. However, in our current, post-encryption world, where we’re dealing with metadata rather than fully visible network traffic, activating flow detections makes the most sense to provide capability broadly across any network. It provides the largest return on investment with minimal effort.
Consider the short tail as data that can be critically inspected with deep packet inspection (DPI) tools capable of decoding all transactions, whereas the long tail consists of vast network segments carrying encrypted traffic. Using the right tools for the job is essential, much like using a sledgehammer for heavy work and power tools for precision tasks. These tools are not mutually exclusive but complement each other. The same applies to flow log detections and traditional packet inspection; they work together to enhance overall security.
Save Your Data Lake for Valued Data
The less extraneous data your data lake contains, the more functional it becomes. By pre-processing flow data before sending it to your data lake, you optimize your system for success. Utilizing best-in-class services to aggregate and format your data for SIEM integration not only enhances performance during detections but also reduces costs while preserving valuable security data sets like VPC or VNet flow logs. This approach ensures that your data lake remains efficient and effective, enabling better security insights and operational efficiency.
Don’t Solve a Problem That’s Already Fixed
Many enterprises have cobbled together tools to create a pipeline for flow logs, but this approach requires constant maintenance and monitoring, often without delivering valuable detections. If your organization is saving flow data for posterity, leveraging a platform like Fusion can significantly reduce your costs, transform the data into actionable security insights, and provide a valuable tool for your cloud, network, and security teams. With Netography, you gain comprehensive visibility and actionable intelligence without the ongoing headaches, ensuring you get the full picture without the pain.
Conclusion
Flow logs from sources like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, IBM, and Oracle present a significant challenge due to their immense size and complexity. While they can overwhelm traditional security technologies and drive up storage costs, ignoring them isn’t a viable option. The key to integrating flow logs into your security stack lies in leveraging innovative solutions like Netography Fusion, which can efficiently process and analyze this data.
By transforming raw flow logs into actionable insights and seamlessly integrating them into your security pipeline, Fusion enhances visibility and response, optimizes resource use, and reduces costs. This approach ensures that flow logs contribute valuable security intelligence, making your security operations more effective and efficient.
About Netography
Netography is the leader in using context-enriched metadata to detect activity that should never occur in your multi-cloud or hybrid network. Netography Fusion is a 100% SaaS, cloud-native platform that provides real-time detection and response to compromises and anomalies at scale, without the burden of deploying sensors, agents, or taps.
Based in Annapolis, MD, Netography® is backed by some of the world’s leading venture firms, including Bessemer Venture Partners, SYN Ventures, and A16Z.