Software Engineering Institute

We are now in the zettabyte ([ZB]; 1000 exabytes [EB]) era with annual global IP traffic expected to reach 3.3 ZB per year by 2021, according to Cisco. The role of the analyst in capturing and evaluating ever-increasing volumes of network traffic enables defenders of large-scale organizational networks to generate security alerts and identify intrusions. To achieve network situational awareness, organizations must understand the mission activity on their network and the threats to that activity (referred to as network situational awareness). In this podcast, Tim Shimeall and Timur Snoke, researchers in the SEI's CERT Division, examine the role of the network traffic analyst in capturing and evaluating this data.