The ability to log network traffic is a huge benefit to network security administrators. Logging systems allow admins to view and analyze activity on their networks, which means they can quickly identify security threats and take action to neutralize them. If you need to protect your network from external threats, then logging and alerts could help you achieve your goal, but you need to use these tools wisely.
Too Much Logging Blinds Us
Logging everything can lead to being blinded by an overwhelming amount of data. You can never hope to meaningfully inspect every piece of traffic that enters your network. Even if you use alerting mechanisms to let you know about the problematic activity, it’s easy to end up in a situation where you are overwhelmed with too many alerts, which can mean that the really serious threats slip through the net.
How Bad is Our Blindness?
According to a 2014 report by Ponemon Institute, the average time from cyber infection to the detection of the threat is 170 days. That means organizations can remain at risk for almost six months because they’re simply not able to cut through the masses of data to find the most critical threats. It can take network security admins more than 600 hours to collect and sort through information to figure out how to resolve a single complex security incident. If you don’t have a system in place to reduce the avalanche of data being generated by your logging systems, your organization’s ability to respond quickly to threats is likely to be severely compromised.
Filters Restore Vision
The key to seeing clearly again is to massively reduce the amount of data that your systems generate and store. Filtering is one very effective way of doing this. A filter can cut down on the huge volume of information coming into the security environment, making the process of looking for threats much easier.
See Clearly With a Next-Gen Geo-IP Filter
One essential filter to use on your data is a Next-Gen Geo-IP filter. This type of filter identifies traffic originating from certain countries and is a low cost, easy-to-implement solution. Security experts claim that the majority of malicious internet traffic originates from just a few countries, with China and Indonesia posing the highest risks. Next-Gen Geo-IP threat protection can identify traffic originating from a particular range of IP addresses, including IPs based in specific countries. You can then take action to protect yourself from any threats presented by that traffic.
What Can a Next-Gen Geo-IP Filter Do?
With Next-Gen Geo-IP filtering, you can get smart with your logging and alerts. This type of filter examines both incoming and outgoing traffic to identify possible threats and keep your systems secure. When you add a Next-Gen Geo-IP layer to your firewall, you can remove as much as 70 percent of the traffic entering your system. The most basic way to use this kind of filter is to simply block traffic from the particular geographic areas that are responsible for most of the cyber threats you face, but this is a blunt tool that can result in a loss of business for a global organization. To avoid inconveniencing genuine customers, you can add their IP addresses to a “safe list” of exceptions, allowing them to access your site without being affected by the Next-Gen Geo-IP filter.
Improving Logging and Filtering
When you begin to cut down the amount of information entering your logging systems, you can reduce the time it takes to identify threats to as little as a few days. That means your organization will be less vulnerable to security risks.
Isn’t it time you stopped ing yourself with too much data? Comment below to let us know what tricks you use to make threats more visible within your organization.
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