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Developing Situational Awareness


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security threat

Credit: GFI

Carnegie Mellon University's Ed Stoner has been researching new approaches to analyzing broad network activity since 1988. Stoner says the ability to monitor large networks and analyze bulk data collections from various data sources is crucial for network and security analysts in order to effectively defend networks from new threats and malicious activity.

Stoner's research has shown that network security analysts need to combine behavioral data about malicious artifacts with the network traffic flow data to understand malicious activity across the network. "Without combining relevant data sets impacting the network, security professionals will fail in characterizing threats and targeted intruder activity," he says.

By targeting vulnerabilities within networks, network security professionals who embrace situational awareness also can see a positive impact on their careers. The research also shows that organizations are heavily investing in practitioners who are entrusted with network security tasks and have a holistic view of protecting their environment to ensure their data is safe. Stoner says all network security professionals must be able to perform incident response, malware analysis, and be able to develop algorithms.

From GovInfoSecurity.com
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Abstracts Copyright © 2012 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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