The evolution of cyber threats has forced organizations across all industries to rethink their security strategies. As attackers become more refined, security teams are discovering threats that wreaking havoc before detecting encryption, land survival techniques, and lateral movements to avoid traditional defenses. Even after an attack is identified, it is difficult to prove to the auditor that the security team has completely alleviated the issue that allowed the attacker.
Security teams around the world prioritize endpoint detection and response (EDR). This has become very effective and has changed the tactics to allow threat actors to avoid attack vectors protected by host-based defenses.
These advanced threats are particularly plaguing government agencies that critical infrastructure providers in financial services, energy and utilities, transportation, and government agencies may have their own systems that cannot be protected by traditional endpoint security.
The elite security team has turned to ground truth, which can only be provided by the network to identify suspicious behavior and demonstrate complete mitigation and compliance. This ground truth provides an immutable record of all network activity, allowing threat hunters to actively search for potential threats.
Financial Services:
Defense against silent threats to financial data
The financial services industry is facing a complete storm. It is the most targeted sector worldwide, operating under strict regulatory requirements, and maintains highly sensitive data commanding premium prices in the criminal market. For financial institutions, network detection and response (NDR) is essential to identify unauthorized data access, protect microsecond transactions, and demonstrate regulatory compliance.
Unauthorized Data Access and Extract Detection
Banks and investment companies deploy NDR solutions to monitor subtle indicators of data theft. Unlike many industries where attackers try to disrupt their businesses, financial services attackers aim to keep their valuable data undetected while they are accessing it. The NDR platform can help identify suspicious data access patterns and attempts to remove, even when disguised within an encrypted channel.
Take a hypothetical scenario in which a major financial institution handles an attacker who has established persistence for more than six months and slowly removes customer financial data using encrypted channels during normal business hours. This type of activity can be missed by SIEM and EDR tools, but NDR can detect unusual traffic patterns that other tools miss.
Maintain the benefits of microsecond security
High-frequency trading (HFT) environments face unique security challenges due to the ultra-low latency requirements that make traditional inline security tools unrealistic. Custom hardware often fails to support endpoint agents and can create visibility gaps, but its own algorithms require protection from theft and operations.
Advanced NDR solutions address these challenges through passive monitoring that implements zero latency while maintaining full network visibility. They provide sophisticated protocol analysis of unique trading protocols that traditional tools cannot decode, and also allow detection of subtle operational attempts with predicted timestamps that are microseconds pre-previous.
Proof of regulatory compliance
Regulations such as the Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA), Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2), and FINRA rules require banks to maintain a comprehensive audit trajectory of network activity. The NDR solution provides detailed forensic evidence necessary for both verification of compliance and post-interior investigations.
The deployment of NDRs provides ongoing network monitoring and evidence preservation required by regulators. When financial institutions experience a security incident, the NDR can demonstrate exactly what happened and how they responded, and provide evidence of whether the violation has been completely remedied.
Energy and Utilities:
Filling the security gap/ot
By controlling traditional IT networks and operational technology (OT) environmental physical infrastructure, the energy sector has become a major target for crime and nation-state actors. Recent bolt typhoon attacks illustrate the threats that actively compromise critical infrastructure by targeting systems that traditional endpoint security cannot protect.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued Order No. 887 requesting Internal Network Security Monitoring (INSM) for the security stack of impactful bulk electrical systems, expanding it to include detection of anomalous network activity beyond perimeter and host-based security controls.
Identifying energy infrastructure reconnaissance
Advanced threat actors usually carry out large-scale reconnaissance before launching an attack. NDR solutions help identify these early stages of activity by detecting anomalous scan patterns, enumeration attempts, and other reconnaissance metrics for critical systems.
OT systems are not necessarily built with cybersecurity in mind, but they have strong physical security capabilities. These systems cannot implement traditional endpoint security technologies and also have their own vulnerabilities. Because you need to be able to access quickly in emergencies, it often doesn’t have stronger security, like complex passwords.
“We’ve often heard customers often reflect the fact that they don’t have time to remember a 15-digit complex password that has been changed every three months, or that they need to reset because someone has forgotten it.” “They need to have quick access to address issues that may be on hand. As a result, organizations may configure easy-to-remember default or simple passwords, but attackers can easily force and bravely pass.”
Monitoring IT/OT convergence points
Energy companies need to monitor traffic between it and the OT network and monitor attempts to pivot from the corporate network into critical operational systems. Security teams cannot deploy endpoint agents on most OT systems, but can monitor network traffic to and from these environments.
The National Regulatory Utilities Commission has established a cybersecurity baseline for power distribution systems that requires organizations to store and protect security-centric logs from authentication tools, intrusion detection/intrusion prevention systems, firewalls, and other security tools for detection and incident response activities. For OT assets whose logs are non-standard or unavailable, they expect to collect and store network traffic and communications between those assets and other systems for forensic purposes that NDR allows.
Detection of protocol abnormalities in industrial systems
Energy companies leverage NDR’s protocol analysis capabilities to identify anomalies in industrial control system communications that may indicate tampering or fraudulent commands. For example, consider a power generation facility that uses the Modbus protocol to control turbine operations. NDR monitoring detects unexpected commands that attempt to set the turbine speed to a dangerous level, detects commands from malformed IP addresses, and flags deviations from communication patterns established before equipment damage or safety occurs.
Transportation:
Protects more and more connected systems
Increasingly connected systems within the transportation industry create greater risk as cybercriminals can access more data and destroy operations along the entire supply chain.
Fleet management and control system monitoring
Transportation agencies must monitor communications between the central management system and the vehicle fleet, vessels, or aircraft. Modern transportation operations rely heavily on real-time data exchange, including GPS coordinates, route optimization, fuel management, and emergency communications. These communications often traverse multiple networks and create many opportunities for intercept or manipulation.
“We’ve heard from our customers that the fleet and signal infrastructure are increasingly connected to maintain efficiency and streamline operations. NDR will make these connections visible and enable us to detect attempts to disrupt a safe system before physical operations are affected,” Stoffer said.
NDR can identify anomalies such as navigation commands from unauthorized sources, attempts to GPS spoof, or suspicious changes to the autopilot system, allowing transport operators to respond to threats before they affect passenger safety.
Passenger data and payment systems protection
Transport companies process large amounts of passenger data and payment information, making them an attractive goal. NDRs help to monitor unauthorized access to these systems, especially from internal networks where attackers may move sideways after the initial compromise.
The NDR’s behavioral analysis capabilities can detect anomalous database queries, anomalous file access patterns, or unexpected network connections to payment processing systems, indicating data harvesting activity.
Detects attempts to discontinue operations
In the case of transportation, operational disruption can have immediate safety implications. Railway signal systems, air traffic control communications, and traffic management platforms represent key control points where malicious interference can lead to catastrophic incidents.
NDR solutions help identify attacks designed to disrupt scheduling, routing, or communication systems before they affect physical operations by monitoring specialized protocols and communication patterns that control the transport infrastructure.
government:
Defense against advanced permanent threats
Government agencies are continuously targeted by highly persistent threats (APTs) from the enemy of nation-states, requiring that they advocate for high value assets and classification information in complex environments, while adhering to stringent federal cybersecurity frameworks such as NIST 800-53, CMMC, and FISMA.
Identifying long-term sustainability and data collection
Agency deploys NDRs to identify subtle indicators of APTs that may establish long-term presence within their networks. These attackers focus on long-term intelligence gathering rather than immediate confusion, which is particularly dangerous to national security interests.
“The threats we faced when we raised our security at the Defense Intelligence Reporting Agency were well-funded, stealthy, refined and lasting,” said Jean Schaffer, CTO of CoreLight Federal. “In the Zero Trust era, where all users and devices need to be continuously validated nowadays, NDR plays a key role by providing the visibility needed to detect lateral movement attacks, whether using legitimate credentials or using a landoff technique to avoid endpoint detection.”
The NDR’s continuous network monitoring feature can analyze the behavior of the baseline network to identify anomalies such as abnormal data flows outside business hours, gradually increasing outbound traffic to suspicious destinations, or subtle changes in communication patterns that indicate lateral movement.
Ensures zero trust compliance
Zero Trust is extremely important for public sector organizations driven by federal mandate that requires agencies to adopt Zero Trust architecture by the end of fiscal year 2024. NDR plays a crucial role in enabling zero trusts by providing the basic network visibility required by the zero trust model.
Zero Trust assumes that a violation has already occurred, so NDR provides real-time monitoring of all network communications, supports identity and access verification, and eliminates blind spots traditional security tools have missed.
Provide evidence of attribution
For national security agencies, understanding the person behind the attack is just as important as detecting the attack itself. NDR provides a wealth of forensic data to help analysts identify tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) associated with a particular threat actor and support attribution efforts.
The platform captures detailed network communications, connection patterns, and use of command and control infrastructures that form the unique behavioral fingerprints of various enemy groups, allowing current incidents to correlate with historical threat intelligence.
General threads across the industry
Although their priorities vary, there are several general themes emerging in these sectors.
- The value of network ground truth: All industries recognize that network traffic provides an objective record of activities that attackers struggle to forge or erase.
- A complementary security approach: Organizations across the sector are deploying NDR along with EDR and SIEM, recognizing that a variety of security technologies are excellent at detecting different types of threats.
- Encrypted Traffic Analysis: As encryption becomes ubiquitous, all industries assess the ability of NDR to provide detailed data and threat detection for encrypted communications, even when decryption is not a viable option.
- Legacy System Support: Each sector relies on NDR to monitor systems that cannot deploy agents due to operational constraints, age, or unique nature.
With the refined cyber threats, the role of NDR in security architectures could continue to grow. The technology’s ability to provide visibility across diverse environments while detecting subtle indicators of compromise is of particular value for organizations protecting critical infrastructure and sensitive data.
For security teams evaluating NDR solutions, understanding these industry-specific use cases can help guide implementation strategies and ensure that technology addresses specific security challenges for your organization. For more information about CoreLight’s open NDR platform, visit CoreLight.com.
