The Importance of Deep Packet Inspection
Written by Quadrant Principle Sales Engineer, Chris Snyder (connect)
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Oooops, I did it again...
I compared our Quadrant Sagan XDR platform with a few of our competitors. One thread I continue to notice is that many other MDR/XDR providers just slap a front-end GUI on a Log Collector (oftentimes open source), without any form of deep packet inspection or robust rule-based detections. Relying mostly on existing detections from EDR tools, which without tuning, are false positive machines.
My Top 3 Reasons Why Deep Packet Inspection 🕵♂️ is Important:
- Comprehensive Threat Detection
By analyzing network packets and logs simultaneously, a security team can gain a more complete picture of potential threats. Packet inspection can reveal hidden attack vectors that may not be apparent in log data alone, such as encrypted traffic or unknown protocols. This holistic view allows security teams to identify and respond to threats more effectively. (A large portion of ransomware activities can be observed using packet inspection, such as large amounts of data being exfiltrated.) - Real-time Threat Detection
Packet inspection enables real-time monitoring of network traffic, enabling security teams to detect and respond to threats as they occur. In contrast, log ingestion may have latency due to the time it takes to collect, process, and analyze log data. This can result in potential threats going undetected or responded to in an untimely manner. - Improved Incident Correlation
By integrating packet inspection and log ingestion, security teams can correlate incidents across multiple data sources, enabling them to identify relationships between different types of threats and better understand the attacker's tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This can lead to more effective threat hunting and improved incident response. (X activity was detected using log analysis, and using packet inspection to see Y activity we determined that Z behavior was malicious.)
Not having the combination of the two (log and packet analysis) leaves a lot of detection capabilities on the table. This is one of many things Quadrant gets "right" amongst the competition. To chat more about packet inspection or other best practices, get in touch with us today.
