A famous line from a movie often used. Frequently though, it’s a pipe dream, people have to fill in the gaps for something missing a plan. It can however, be a bigger problem as well, bring a picnic basket to sit under a tree on a summer day and you’ll find lots of little critters, looking to share your lunch. Turn up a new server, or put your computer at home online and almost instantly machines start trying to talk to this new system.

In the industry we all “know” this happens, but do most people at home, or companies with out focused security teams, do they know what is really happening. I suspect most people will blame the “Russians” or the “Chinese”, but it’s hard to track who is really controlling these events, often hidden behind several levels of compromised machines. To the end user, do you REALLY care, not really, you just want it to stop. Seeing where this traffic is actually coming from is a first step in being able to stop it. The problem is most people don’t know where the traffic is really coming from. We recently turned up a couple of servers inside of Amazon’s AWS to test some new software we’ve been developing for use inside of AWS. The machines aren’t doing anything other than sending empty information packets back and forth currently; there is no sensitive data on the machines. None of our software is on them, no one knows they are ours. But a lot of machines are trying to connect to them to find out what is there. The image above is generated by a Mimir Networks system; it shows traffic from many countries, trying to break into these 2 empty servers. This is only a 2-hour random snapshot.

Imagine if this was connected to your office network, or your data center, where you have company information, client information, and patient or credit card information. Do you have the visibility into your network to stop the attackers already at your door?

Email to set up a live demo of your network traffic to help you get the visibility you need.