It seems no one is immune to a cyber-attack these days. From the recent cyber warfare waged against three major U.S. data providers—Dun & Bradstreet Corp, Altegrity Inc’s Kroll Background America Inc and Reed Elsevier’s LexisNexis—to the reoccurring attacks from the Syrian Electronic Army, a group that has been responsible for hacking high-profile websites such as CBS, NPR and Financial Times, invasions and breaches are becoming increasingly ubiquitous.
Since cyber crimes claim 556 million victims per year—and over 1.5 million per day—the global cyber security market is expected to skyrocket from $63.7 million in 2011 to $120.1 billion by 2017, according to research. These attacks can take on a variety of forms from viruses and Trojans to SQL injection to worms and malware. In fact, a highly targeted form of identity theft, known as spear-phishing, is quickly starting to dominate the headlines. In this type of attack, thieves enter a network by gaining unauthorized access to secure information. They rely on this approach to target individual users who get duped into sharing their passwords or installing malware on their machines which grants the malicious user access to network administration.
As a company, running a 1G or 10G network you are probably feeling anxious about the potential for botnet and advanced malware threats—which continuously test network security and privacy measures to harm your business. But fortunately, there is a critical step you can take to ensure you are never at the mercy of these villains: invest in a Unified Threat Management (UTM) or Intrusion Prevention System (IPS device). These devices will act as a defense against the various cyber-attacks and threats that can be going on in your networks. As your network grows with these different appliances, though, you will continue to need visibility and network monitoring.
That’s where a network packet broker comes in. Previously known as intelligent taps, matrix switches and span aggregators, a network packet broker is deployed as part of network architecture to help with the operations and traffic monitoring. By using a network packet broker, you can aggregate, filter, mirror, packet slice and load balance traffic which creates greater visibility in your network. More SPAN or TAP ports can be utilized and more traffic can be seen by these protection devices. For instance, rather than having ten 1G critical network links being monitored by ten different UTM or IPS devices, you can aggregate those ten network links by utilizing a 10G network packet broker to one 10G UTM or 10G IPS, which in turn will save CAPEX and OPEX of having less appliances in your network.
You need support from a reliable network packet broker provider to keep you on track as your network grows. If you’re on the hunt for the market’s strongest and most comprehensive 1G, 10G and 40G network monitoring and visibility tools, click here to see what Interface Masters can do for you.
Interface Masters Technologies has for over 20 years been providing off-the-shelf innovative network security solutions with customization services to OEMs, Fortune 100 and startup companies. Our headquarters are located in San Jose, California in the heart of Silicon Valley where we are proud to design and manufacture all of our products. Based on MIPS, ARM, PowerPC and x86 processors, Interface Masters appliance models enable OEMs to significantly reduce time-to-market with reliable, pre-tested and pre-integrated networking solutions that can meet the most challenging security requirements.