From Packets to Protection: How Network Observability Powers Security and Forensics – Source: securityboulevard.com

In cybersecurity, the old maxim “you can’t secure what you can’t see” serves as one of the primary guiding principles. As enterprise networks grow increasingly distributed and complex across on-premises data centers, private clouds, and diverse public cloud environments, traditional security tools often struggle to provide a comprehensive view. This is exactly where network observability comes into play. Solutions like those offered by cPacket Networks are not just nice to have. They enhance an organization’s security posture by delivering pervasive, precise, and performant packet data analysis across every aspect of incident management, from proactive threat detection to meticulous forensic analysis and ongoing validation.

Building a Resilient Security Foundation: The Power of Pervasive Visibility

The key to cPacket’s effectiveness lies in its commitment to “anywhere observability.” This means the capability to capture every single packet, no matter where it traverses, from within a spread-out corporate campus, a remote branch office, a bustling colocation facility, or across various public and private cloud infrastructures. This pervasive visibility, achieved at speeds of 100 Gbps, 200 Gbps, and even 400 Gbps, allows organizations to inspect trillions of packets daily and extract data on billions of sessions. This scale is necessary for robust security. Unlike security tools that primarily rely on application logs (which can be manipulated or deleted by a sophisticated attacker), cPacket’s capture methodology provides an independent, tamper-proof, and immutable record of network activity. It acts as the network’s “black box,” offering an unfiltered and undeniable account of the actual thing that happened. This creates an indispensable truth source for accurate analysis.

This high-performance architecture, driven by advanced FPGAs and ASICs, guarantees line-rate performance with 100% accountability for packet brokers. It also ensures lossless packet capture up to 200 Gbps so that no critical data is ever dropped or missed. cPacket is also committed to open integration, facilitated by robust REST and MCP APIs, which allows for seamless interoperability with existing security ecosystems, including SIEMs like Datadog and ServiceNow, and Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions. This collaborative approach enhances existing workflows without requiring a disruptive overhaul of an organization’s current security investments.

Incident Detection: Unmasking Threats in Real-Time

cPacket’s analytics platform employs a dual strategy for incident detection: deterministic (threshold-based) and AI-enhanced (anomaly-based).

For deterministic detection, the Smart Port feature, powered by dedicated hardware, inspects every packet and byte at line rate to perform real-time string matches. This enables immediate identification of specific Indicators of Compromise (IOCs).  These could be something like malicious domain names embedded within unencrypted DNS traffic. cPacket provides instant confirmation of potential infection, as seen in supply chain attack scenarios involving AVSM cloud beaconing. Similarly, by precisely counting every packet at the monitoring point, cPacket can rapidly detect large-scale volumetric DDoS attacks, identifying signs like SYN/SYN-ACK ratio imbalances (indicative of SYN floods) or a high volume of DNS responses without corresponding requests (pointing to DNS amplification attacks). These detections are often measured in seconds, offering significantly faster and more accurate insights than methods like NetFlow. The speed of detection means faster response and remediation. For more elusive threats, the packet capture can track millions of open TCP sessions to pinpoint Command and Control (C2) channels. These are often slow burn sessions characterized by long durations and minimal data transfer, signaling infected devices maintaining persistent communication with C2 servers, allowing security teams to flag suspicious long-lived connections. By quickly identifying the C2 servers you can block access to them and begin remediating infected hosts in the network.

 

The AI-enhanced incident detection system is designed for scenarios where traditional thresholds are either unknown or unmanageable. cPacket’s AI solutions establish a dynamic baseline of normal network behavior by analyzing billions of sessions and a multitude of metrics. This baseline intelligently adapts to factors such as location, application, time of day/week, and even unique events. The AI then identifies subtle deviations from this norm, pinpointing suspicious activities like data exfiltration, lateral movement, or the aforementioned slow burn DDoS attacks. It also effectively identifies scanners, providing early warnings of probing activity before more severe attacks. The AI engine correlates and aggregates multiple detected incidents into concise insights, offering security teams a clear, actionable overview of what happened, when it happened, and where in the network it’s going down.

Incident Response: Digital Forensics with Unquestionable Evidence

cPacket’s pervasive packet capture capabilities are a huge boon for effective digital forensics. The CStor functions as the definitive “black box” for network incidents, providing the complete context of a breach. By capturing every packet, it delivers the actual attack information carried within the network traffic–a critical component for truly understanding what happened and, more importantly, for making sure it doesn’t happen again.

The data captured by cPacket is tamper-proof, offering a reliable and immutable record that stands in contrast to system logs, which are targeted by attackers trying to cover their tracks. The CStor also boasts massive storage capacities, extending up to two petabytes with object store integration, enabling organizations to retain packet data for extended periods (typically 7 to 30 days, but configurable for much longer). This extensive retention facilitates in-depth analysis following an incident to help answer questions from the IR team. cPacket’s architecture allows for not only capturing packets at line rate but also indexing them concurrently. This concurrent indexing ensures rapid retrieval of relevant packets even from massive datasets, significantly reducing the time required for forensic investigations. When an NDR solution or another security tool flags an incident, cPacket can update the incident ticket with direct access to the relevant PCAP file. This empowers security teams to drill down immediately from high-level alerts to granular, packet-level details, accelerating root cause analysis. The system also offers the flexibility to analyze packet captures obtained from other sources, centralizing forensic analysis capabilities.

Looking to the near future, cPacket is developing Agentic AI capabilities that will enable security experts to query both raw data and AI-derived insights using natural language. This promises to offer unparalleled flexibility in auditing network behavior and generating comprehensive reports without the need for complex query languages, all while maintaining strict controls to prevent harmful operations.

Bringing It All Together

cPacket’s network observability platform provides a robust, reliable foundation for digital forensics. This is thanks to unparalleled deep packet capture, high-performance analytics, pervasive deployment across hybrid environments, and intelligent AI-driven insights. It ensures a complete and tamper-proof record of network activity, empowering organizations to conduct thorough investigations, understand the true root cause of security incidents, and continuously validate their defenses against the perpetually evolving threat landscape.

If you’re interested in learning more about cPacket, CStor, and all the capabilities of integration of their network analytics tools into your security solutions, make sure to check out their website at https://cPacket.com. If you’d like to watch all the videos from Security Field Day, you can find them on the Security Field Day appearance page. Make sure you tune in for their presentation at Networking Field Day coming up July 10, 2025.