Where did those damn packets go?

Presented at THOTCON 0x1 (2010), April 23, 2010, 12:30 p.m. (20 minutes).

Passive network monitoring has been a foundational to network security architectures for over a decade. IDS, DLP, link capacity planning, and network troubleshooting usually relies on having full visibility into in-flight network data. For years we sat back and enjoyed the fact that our Pentium computers could easily outrun our measly WAN speeds and accessing the traffic was a simple matter of configuring a SPAN port on a switch. Today we face the challenge an uphill battle when 10GigE+ interconnects are common place, virtualization platforms are keeping data off our switch ports, and more and more of our data is headed out our egress links to the cloud. This talk will discuss today�s challenges, provide an overview of new product classes that can help us stand up to those challenges, and what we need to do to keep our heads above water moving forward.


Presenters:

  • Kevin A. Nassery
    Kevin A. Nassery is a hands-on technical architect, who has been an active Unix systems, network, and security engineer and consultant for more than a decade. After serving for more than four years as principal infrastructure architect for a major online presence, he recently returned to his passion of security consulting. At present, he is a RHCE, CISSP, and holds an MS from Depaul University in Computer, Information, and Network security. He is currently a senior security consultant with Consciere LLC.

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