The Ultimate Net Monitoring Tool
Sniffing an enterprise network is a pretty easy task to perform, especially with the right tools. However, just because a tool offers the capability to easily capture data does not mean that interpreting that collected information is easy. That is, unless you have access to the ultimate net monitoring tool, the tool that the NSA enlisted in their eavesdropping program that was recently uncovered.
“Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”
Narus’ product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It’s renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they race by at up to 10 Gbps.
Sounds like a well designed product, especially if it is capable of keeping up with traffic flowing at a rate of 10Gbps. When you get that high you generally see software of this nature start to drop packets because of the amount of data being pumped through the pipes.
If you are truly concerned about the NSA reading your email, and opening up sensitive attachments, then encrypting your email is the best thing you can do. Grab PGP and be on your way to ensuring what you write is only read by the intended recipients, not some NSA lackey.