Network Security Situational Awareness

What Is Network Security Situational Awareness?

Situational awareness, often abbreviated as SA, involves perceiving environmental elements in relation to time and space, understanding their significance, and predicting their future state. In the context of network security, situational awareness refers to applying these principles to understand the security status of a network. This includes identifying network issues and anomalies, enabling personnel to provide feedback and make improvements. Analyzing and projecting the network security situation over time forms a solid basis for making informed decisions at a higher level.

Why do we need Network Security Situational Awareness？

As network and information technologies continue to advance, people are becoming increasingly aware of security issues. Networks can never be entirely secure, and eventual attacks are inevitable. While we may not be able to prevent attacks, we can proactively identify and detect them early to minimize damage. This shift indicates a move from passive defense to proactive and intelligent protection.

Moreover, rapid developments in IoT and cloud technologies have led to the emergence of disruptive technologies. These innovations bring new security challenges, as the increasing concealment and complexity of network attacks require network security personnel to possess enhanced capabilities.

Amidst this backdrop, there has been rapid development in products and solutions revolving around network security situational awareness technologies. These advancements have the potential to overhaul the entire security protection system, bringing about the following three key changes:

• The focus of security construction shifts from mere compliance to enhancing defense and deterrence capabilities, emphasizing proactive measures. This necessitates more advanced intelligence technologies.

• The approach to attack detection transitions from dealing with known threats to identifying unknown threats. Technologies such as big data analytics, anomaly detection, situational awareness, and machine learning are leveraged to detect and counter advanced threats.

• The response to threats evolves from manual analysis and intervention to automatic and closed-loop responses, highlighting the importance of emergency response and collaboration. This approach aims to achieve a flexible and responsive security framework.

Applications of Network Security Situational Awareness

Building a network security situational awareness system is both intricate and costly, typically implemented in large and medium-sized enterprises as well as large organizations. However, for small businesses, a more viable option would be a single integrated product with reduced performance but simpler functions and architecture.

• Major industries: From an industry standpoint, the system oversees and supervises the network security status of internal systems within an industry. Currently, network security situational awareness is primarily utilized in sectors such as government, finance, network operations, and education.

• Large organizations or enterprises: In terms of regular security operations and maintenance, the system oversees and supervises the security status of core assets and service systems.

• Government agencies: On a governmental scale, the system oversees and supervises the network security status of relevant information infrastructure.

How Is the Effectiveness of Situational Awareness Construction Assessed?

The effectiveness of constructing network security situational awareness can be assessed based on the following criteria:

• Defense: The ability to utilize gathered intelligence and asset investigation information to enhance the defense system and mitigate asset risks.

• Detection: Provision of continuous network security monitoring capabilities for prompt and accurate detection of security threats.

• Response: Availability of response capabilities encompassing terminals and networks to facilitate attack forensics, event source tracing, threat mitigation, and similar actions.

• Prediction: The capacity to offer improvement recommendations derived from comprehensive analyses of historical security incidents, prevalent live-network attacks, and intelligence systems.