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I am not an expert on network security and I have no idea what "out of band network tap" means... If I read it right, the article is saying that in order to hav

by runn1ng 11y ago

I am not an expert on network security and I have no idea what "out of band network tap" means... If I read it right, the article is saying that in order to have a secure network, you should monitor what is going on in it and detect anomalies, ok? That's a good point, I guess. (however, the blog is on a page of a company, that seems to me to be selling network monitoring devices.)

feld 11y ago
Out of band tap would be a device used to sniff a port mirror of all the traffic coming through the network under scrutiny. The "out of band" part means that this device itself should live on a completely separate network from the one it is sniffing/analyzing.
- tsupasat 11y ago
  Yes. In addition, this type of monitoring cannot be turned off. Hackers can turn off logging on servers, but they cannot keep from sending communications over the wire.
cws 11y ago
Valid point. An out-of-band network tap is definitely a pretty insider-y term to the networking community. What it means is that there's a device sitting in a company's datacenter that can receive a copy of all the traffic flowing through that network without impacting the performance of said network. Some performance management tools will use up some of the bandwidth of a network to be able to perform their duties. An out-of-band tap offers a way to get visibility into what's happening in your network so you can monitor performance without sapping bandwidth.
massemphasis 11y ago
Instead of the NSA going to your company's network and illegally tapping into it, your company signs up to an NSA promoted company to tap into their network. Because network tapping is fast becoming expensive, they provide the out-of-bands tapping as a service. An out of bands tap is like having a splitter on the wire that copies the signals that pass through the wire but does not interact with the data in any other way other than to copy it. Attackers cannot see the out-of-band tap, but they can try to attack or detect its presence. The infamous NSA tapping of AT&T's entire communication network in California was an out of bands tap. It copied all of the communication passing through the AT&T central comms node in California to a NSA controlled data site through an out-of-bands tap installed into AT&T's network in the form of a fiber-optics splitter.

by runn1ng 11y ago

feld 11y ago

Out of band tap would be a device used to sniff a port mirror of all the traffic coming through the network under scrutiny. The "out of band" part means that this device itself should live on a completely separate network from the one it is sniffing/analyzing.

tsupasat 11y ago
Yes. In addition, this type of monitoring cannot be turned off. Hackers can turn off logging on servers, but they cannot keep from sending communications over the wire.

cws 11y ago

Valid point. An out-of-band network tap is definitely a pretty insider-y term to the networking community. What it means is that there's a device sitting in a company's datacenter that can receive a copy of all the traffic flowing through that network without impacting the performance of said network. Some performance management tools will use up some of the bandwidth of a network to be able to perform their duties. An out-of-band tap offers a way to get visibility into what's happening in your network so you can monitor performance without sapping bandwidth.

massemphasis 11y ago

Instead of the NSA going to your company's network and illegally tapping into it, your company signs up to an NSA promoted company to tap into their network. Because network tapping is fast becoming expensive, they provide the out-of-bands tapping as a service. An out of bands tap is like having a splitter on the wire that copies the signals that pass through the wire but does not interact with the data in any other way other than to copy it. Attackers cannot see the out-of-band tap, but they can try to attack or detect its presence. The infamous NSA tapping of AT&T's entire communication network in California was an out of bands tap. It copied all of the communication passing through the AT&T central comms node in California to a NSA controlled data site through an out-of-bands tap installed into AT&T's network in the form of a fiber-optics splitter.