In my 20 years in the industry, I have never heard anybody mention that they “have enough bandwidth.” Most people I talk to simply say they have “as much as we can afford”, or “the fastest available today”.

Although there is no doubt that networks have gotten faster since the early days when I dialed my BBS with a 14.4k modem (who still remembers FidoNet?), our data consumption has grown at least as quickly.

With companies like NetFlix topping 25 million subscribers with an insatiable demand for HD content on their computers, iPads, and cellphones, the need for ubiquitous bandwidth is greater than ever. And this growth in demand is showing no signs of slowing.

Processor Magazine features FlowTraq

Processor Magazine’s article entitled, “Follow the Network Flow” discusses how FlowTraq monitors network flows and alerts you to potential vulnerabilities.    FlowTraq’s quick set up and SIEM integration is featured in the article, along with FlowTraq’s full fidelity flow analysis.

You can read the full article here. 

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Tilera® has solved the multi-processor scalability problem with a revolutionary new chip architecture and a programming tool set that can harness the processing power of hundreds of cores on a single chip. Using this chip, FlowTraq solutions provide unmatched monitoring, security, and analysis of networks with multiple 10Gbps links.

The development team is happy to announce that the Q2/12 release of FlowTraq is ready to download. This new version of FlowTraq packs in a number of new features you’ll want to explore:

• SIEM integration. We’ve improved our notification system to let you send notifications to Arcsight, Splunk, or your favorite SIEM (Security Incident and Event Manager) solution using syslog over UDP.
• Firewall event filtering for ASA firewalls lets you quickly search for flows that were created, deleted, or denied.
• Improved support for VLAN tags with sFlow.
• Broader support for IPFIX over UDP.
• Significantly improved, searchable documentation.
• A printable user manual.

As always, in addition to new features, the new version contains lots of changes under the hood of the kind we hope you won’t notice: stability enhancements and fixes to bugs we’ve discovered and you’ve reported.

Every quarterly release of FlowTraq brings additional functionality and allows customers to monitor and analyze their networks and address security issues faster than ever before.  Existing users can download the FlowTraq Q2/12 update by visiting the FlowTraq Download Page 

FlowTraq helps IT professionals to prevent or quickly solve security issues.  If you don’t already use FlowTraq, you can download a trial version of the full-fidelity network flow analyzer now - Try FlowTraq

We’ve been busy squashing bugs, adding features, and stress-testing FlowTraq, so it’s hard to say what we’re most excited about in this new release, but we think the feature that will get the most notice is SIEM integration. FlowTraq Q2/12 can now send updates on any alertable condition straight to Splunk™, ArcSight™, or your favorite SIEM via syslog/udp.

If you’re a current FlowTraq user or partner, we warmly invite you to download FlowTraq Q2/12 Preview; just let us know if you want to try it.

Speculation has it that tomorrow, March 31st, the tubes will be clogged and the Internet will be globally unavailable. That is especially tragic since the weekend is a nice time for watching NetFlix or placing an order with Amazon.

A distributed denial of service attack against the name resolution infrastructure is not a new phenomenon, and it has seen limited success in the past. What surprised me, however, is the detailed announcement of the attack method. Which, assuming we believe the post, might allow all of us to bolster our defenses since most reflective DNS attacks can simply be mitigated with proper firewall filtering rules.

Or perhaps the level of detail is intended to act as a decoy. No one really knows. I, for one, will be carefully monitoring my network with FlowTraq. And maybe I will read a book…

by Vincent Berk 

In order to successfully secure a computer network one must understand what makes that network uniquely vulnerable. Governments, from the federal to the state and local level, face a number of factors that complicate their network defense – factors which other organizations also suffer to a lesser degree. FlowTraq Netflow Analysis provides a tailored solution for the security of government sites with threat recognition for all three of the following situations.

1. Unique Target – No Other Targets

Government networks are desirable, high-profile targets, and there aren’t that many around. An attacker intent on compromising a bank has many targets to choose from, but there is only one US Federal Reserve. When there are many similar targets, it is more likely an attacker will target several and pick the low-hanging fruit. Government networks are necessarily high-profile, and a successful compromise could possibly be politically-charged.

Visibility into the traffic traversing the network coupled with long-term retention allows operators to compare traffic to patterns in the past. This forensic ability facilitates forensic discovery and analysis of recently discovered compromises, data leaks, and botnets.

2. Duplication – Many Targets

Due to the distributed nature of government facilities, it is likely that there is duplication of a similar architecture to many different sites. Many branch offices will be implemented with the same or a very similar infrastructures, which reduces costs, simplifies training, and reduces overhead. It also means that vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and design flaws are duplicated many times over, leaving all those networks vulnerable to the same issues.

Proper defense requires the ability to compare network traffic between homogeneous sites. Such comparisons allow for discovery of unique attacks and issues. It also allows quick sanity-checking: when an issue is found and resolved at one site, it allows for verifying if other sites are similarly affected.

3. Regulation, Policy, Classification, and Segmentation – Complex to Defend

Government networks are harder to defend as regulation, policy, and security classifications force a more complex network design, one where some operators have more visibility than others. It might also not be straightforward to compare traffic patterns between multiple tiers in the organization due to classification level or privacy requirements. Secondary to this is the tendency to use homegrown network solutions to meet specific policy requirements.

The defender, however, can take advantage of the complexity in their defense. Complexity implies unique and very recognizable traffic patterns. Searching for any traffic that does not fit the expected pattern is a powerful way to discover anomalies. FlowTraq(tm) offers the government network operator the ability to investigate, compare, and search for traffic faster and more conveniently than any other product on the market.

Our users select and stick with FlowTraq “because it works.” FlowTraq is a solid solution for security of government sites, alerts, and threat recognition. The license costs of FlowTraq are minimal when compared to homegrown solutions requiring internal resource hours to develop, test, and maintain. FlowTraq is ready to use and is maintained by ProQueSys through an active quarterly release cycle.

Download your trial copy of FlowTraq today

•  Email (SMTP) notifications are now generated for Alerts, Scheduled Reports, and System Messages.
• New configuration option on the Dashboard Report Widget to specify how many ranking entries to retrieve (10, 25, 50, 100, or 1000).
•  Interactive connection graphs –  explore the relationship between entities in pairwise views and interactively filter them. This is an experimental feature – we’re looking for feedback to make this a great feature in a future release.
• Significant flow database access optimizations.
• The filtering language has been made significantly more intuitive (more info here http://support.proquesys.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=77 ).
• Improved documentation and error reporting.

Bug fixes: Addressed an issue where PDF reports would fail to be written correctly to certain types of file shares. And, fixed an issue where a misconfigured dashboard Chart widget could gradually fill a server’s query input queue, slowing server response for all users.

Try FlowTraq Now – 14 Day Free Trial 

To recap from the beta announcement: we’ve enjoyed a fast-growing customer base this quarter, and you’ve provided us with a lot of excellent feedback which we’ve used to make FlowTraq even better than it was just a few months ago.

Among Q4′s new features:

• Email notification (SMTP) for Alerts, Scheduled Reports, and System Messages.
• Significantly more intuitive filtering (more info here).
• Experimental feature: Interactive connection graphs, which let you explore the relationship between entities in pairwise views.
• Bug fixes, UI streamlining, and other refinement.

As always, we are grateful to our users for their feedback, and wish everyone the happiest of holidays.

~The FlowTraq Team