Why do you use Netflow

Tue Aug 19 20:32:47 UTC 2003

On Tue, 2003-08-19 at 16:12, Jack Bates wrote:
> Number one use for netflow, scan detections. I detect most users 
> infected with a virus before remote networks can auto-gen a report. I 
> also detect mail being sent from various customer machines. High volume 
> traffic flags me so I can investigate if it's spam or not.

Cool.. I never thought of using it for this...

> I can tell you (well, I won't without a court order, but I could) the 
> username, or customer name (if static), of every worm infected user on 
> my network at any given point in time. 50+ inactive flows for an IP 
> address is definite worm sign. If you want to be more specific, do 
> sequential scan checks on the flow data. Has been very useful in dealing 
> with Blaster.

Worm Sign...  Dune...  Cool :)

We used ip accounting the other night to detect and disable a large
number of worm infected users that took out the router completely..  I
think net flow would have been too much overhead at the time...  Once we
were down to a more manageable number of infected users, we used netflow
to pinpoint them immediately...  (Note, we don't leave netflow on all
the time)

> Netflow is particularly useful when utilizing NAT, as it's much easier 
> to collected netflow data than translation tables.
> 
> On a cold, boring day, you can setup aggregates and generate cute little 
> statistics for all sorts of things, and I hear it's useful in some 
> scenarios.

Sounds like fun...  I wish I had slow boring days...  *grin*

> -Jack
-- 
---------------------------
Jason H. Frisvold
Backbone Engineering Supervisor
Penteledata Engineering
friz at corp.ptd.net
RedHat Engineer - RHCE # 807302349405893
Cisco Certified - CCNA # CSCO10151622
MySQL Core Certified - ID# 205982910
---------------------------
"Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles
the world."
      -- Albert Einstein [1879-1955]
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