In network forensics, visibility into network and application activity is essential for identifying and responding to incidents. When traditional data sources like NetFlow or IPFIX are unavailable, capturing, and analyzing network data becomes critical for understanding security breaches, anomalies, or performance issues.
The four key data sources critical for forensic analysis and network troubleshooting are:
- Flow data (NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, etc.)
- SNMP
- Packet data
- APIs
LiveAction has developed a comprehensive set of tools, LiveNX and LiveWire, which utilize these data sources for traffic analysis, root-cause investigation, and forensic research. The seamless integration of these tools into a unified dashboard gives investigators powerful tools for understanding network behaviors and solving security incidents.
Challenge: Forensic Visibility in the Modern Network
As businesses move through digital transformation, the landscape of network monitoring has changed, necessitating forensic analysis of traffic to investigate malicious activities, breaches, or policy violations. When a network issue occurs, or suspicious activity is detected, IT teams must perform network forensics to trace the problem to its origin, determine the scope, and recover quickly.
Network forensics relies heavily on being able to access all relevant data about network traffic, including flow and packet-level data. Whether dealing with application performance, security incidents, or downtime issues, having access to network data can provide critical evidence for solving problems and detecting anomalies.
The path forward is clear: optimize forensic visibility across all available data sources by leveraging every possible input – Flow Data, SNMP, Packet Date and APIs.
LiveAction provides an integrated solution that aggregates, stores, analyzes, and presents this critical forensic data within a single, easily accessible platform.
Solution: Unified Network Forensics with LiveNX and LiveWire
LiveNX
LiveNX provides real-time and historical insights into network and application behavior, generating alerts for unusual activity or performance degradation. In the context of forensics, these alerts can help identify the time and nature of incidents that require investigation.
LiveNX collects and analyzes network data to provide insights for network design, policy validation, and operations. It also integrates with LiveWire to enable deep packet inspection, offering forensic professionals the ability to access packet-level details for root-cause analysis, all from a unified platform. By streamlining access to network and application data, LiveNX helps investigators reduce the mean time to incident detection and resolution (MTTD/MTTR).
LiveWire
LiveWire focuses on packet-based analysis, a critical component of network forensics. It captures, stores, and analyzes packets in real-time, providing detailed insights into network events at a granular level.
Forensic investigators often need to look deeper than flow data to determine the exact nature of network incidents. LiveWire generates flow data directly from packet captures, filling in visibility gaps where traditional flow generation isn’t available or reliable. LiveWire’s detailed packet analysis can help uncover malicious payloads, unauthorized access, and abnormal traffic patterns, offering detailed evidence to resolve security breaches.
Advantages for Network Forensics
A forensic network investigation platform like LiveAction offers several key advantages for security and troubleshooting teams:
- Expanded Visibility: By generating flow data directly from captured packets, LiveWire provides enhanced network visibility in areas where traditional monitoring is lacking, such as virtualized environments or oversubscribed devices.
- Root-Cause Analysis with Packet Data: Flow data often provides enough information to understand what’s happening, but in more complex cases, packet-level inspection is necessary. LiveWire integrates this capability seamlessly, allowing investigators to pivot between flow and packet analysis quickly.
- Advanced Flow Data Generation: LiveAction goes beyond standard NetFlow/IPFIX, generating enriched flow data that includes TCP metrics, retransmission details, and VoIP-specific information like jitter and call quality, providing vital clues for forensic analysis.
Forensic Use Cases
SD-WAN Optimization and Incident Response
Forensic investigations into SD-WAN environments require advanced tools to identify performance and security incidents across remote locations. LiveNX and LiveWire provide visibility into application performance, routing anomalies, and potential attack vectors in SD-WAN networks.
VoIP and Application Performance Forensics
VoIP and other time-sensitive applications can suffer from latency, jitter, and packet loss—key indicators of both performance and potential security issues. LiveNX and LiveWire enable forensic teams to analyze VoIP and application traffic to identify the cause of communication failures or malicious traffic flows.
Visibility Across Remote, Campus, and Cloud Networks
Forensic teams often face challenges gaining visibility across hybrid and cloud environments. LiveNX and LiveWire deliver comprehensive visibility across physical and virtual infrastructures, providing critical insights into network performance and incident response across the entire network.
Security Incident Response
Network forensics is essential in security incident response. When an intrusion occurs, you need access to every relevant packet to fully understand the scope of the attack. LiveWire records every packet it sees, allowing investigators to trace the attack path, analyze payloads, and identify the malicious actors involved.
Hybrid IT Monitoring and Forensics
As applications span on-premises and cloud networks, forensic analysis requires end-to-end visibility to map out paths and determine how issues arose. LiveNX and LiveWire provide detailed path analysis, tracking traffic as it moves between cloud and local networks, delivering key data on performance metrics like latency, packet loss, and utilization for both performance and forensic investigations.
Summary
For network forensics, the combination of LiveNX and LiveWire offers unparalleled visibility into network and application traffic. Whether you need flow-level insights or packet-level details, this unified solution provides investigators with the tools necessary to detect, analyze, and resolve complex network security incidents.
LiveAction equips you to respond faster to incidents, minimize downtime, and maintain the security and integrity of your digital infrastructure.
For more information, please visit https://www.liveaction.com/products