Active Monitoring vs. Passive Monitoring – Which is Better?

In today’s cyber threat landscape, continuously monitoring your attack surface is critical to alert you to signs of potential cyber attacks and gives you the ability to thwart them before they become devastating to your network and organization.

There are different types of cybersecurity network monitoring, all of which can work together to build an effective overall cyber strategy. The most common types of monitoring include active monitoring, passive monitoring, and a combination of both, which is hybrid monitoring.

Each approach offers distinct advantages and can work for your organization depending on your cybersecurity goals.

Below you will find some of the details of how active monitoring and passive monitoring work, advantages, and drawbacks to each, use cases, and which might be the best option for your organization.

Active Monitoring

How does active monitoring work?

The process of active monitoring, which is sometimes referred to as synthetic monitoring at times, is the practice of monitoring the performance of an organization’s network, the applications that run on it, and its overall infrastructure.

The common uses of active monitoring are for testing performance monitoring, network testing, and troubleshooting.

For network cybersecurity purposes, active monitoring attempts to continuously probe the network for the purpose of identifying security threats, detecting potential vulnerabilities and recognizing unauthorized access attempts. It will look at network traffic and logs and rely on other data sources to look for malicious activity, in an attempt to detect attacks before they happen.

Benefits of Active Monitoring

This approach will simulate traffic and network behavior to identify performance issues before they become an issue on the front end of your network. It gives organizations and the team monitoring immediate notification to resolve and minimize the issues it finds.

Active monitoring does provide the benefit of complete visibility into your network, eliminating blind spots. Visibility into your network is a crucial part of overall network security.

Utilizing this approach to evaluate your network’s performance and probing it for security issues will use synthetic data, which eliminates issues with privacy, because no user data is actually collected.

Drawbacks of Active Monitoring

The reason active monitoring is also referred to as “synthetic” monitoring is because it does not measure actual traffic. It simulates what would be considered normal traffic and user behavior, but that can lead to unpredictability and accuracy issues. Active monitoring will attempt to predict how the network will respond to normal activity and suspicious activity in real time but based on predictive data.

Active monitoring will require heavy resources on networks, and has been associated with higher costs, time and overall effort in terms of vigilance.

Passive Monitoring

How does passive monitoring work?

Passive monitoring works to continuously capture data for analysis from various sources. It will pull in real data from specific points in the network, capturing packets that pass through and send them to a central location for analysis.

Unlike active monitoring, passive monitoring does not generate its own traffic to test the system, rather monitoring the system without interacting on its own. It observes the natural behavior of the system.

Through the behavioral analysis portion of passive monitoring, the system can detect deviations that indicate a potential security breach or cyber attack.

The process of passive monitoring can also generate reports that include details on network performance, overall security posture and other security reports.

A passive monitoring approach provides a non-intrusive way to continuously observe and analyze system activities through real-time traffic and collecting data to develop and understand patterns to create a baseline of behavior within the individual network itself.

Benefits of Passive Monitoring

The first benefit that provides actionable results is monitoring based on real data capture. Unlike active monitoring, there is no simulation of data or generating traffic to test.

You get a holistic view of the network performance, which allows for more accurate and deeper analysis of the network, traffic, performance, and potential issues to address. This data comes through in real time.

Passive monitoring is effective at detecting security threats and network anomalies thanks to the ability to analyze traffic patterns and trends. That data can then be used to determine the cause of a breach, give the ability to isolate that area and mitigate the impact of a breach.

Passive monitoring is often used for security surveillance, anomaly detection, and traffic analysis.

Vulnerabilities: The system can detect deviations that indicate a vulnerability or a potential security breach or cyber attack

Drawbacks of Passive Monitoring

Traffic that is encrypted can be a security challenge for all types of monitoring, including passive network monitoring.

In order for passive network monitoring to accurately capture and analyze traffic sources that could be potential threats, there must be an accurate understanding of every type of front facing device connected to the network to account for the potential intrusion through that device.

The system or technology used to deploy passive network monitoring must be programmed to properly analyze traffic in order to detect anomalies. This is true of all traffic. If there isn’t enough traffic to analyze, there may not be sufficient data to understand what is normal and what is an anomaly. With higher amounts of traffic, it will increase demand and resources of course. The organization utilizing the passive network monitoring service will need to have the resources available to handle this.

Conclusion

Both active network monitoring and passive network monitoring can be used to achieve different goals. There are several use cases for each method based on need.

If your goal is to manage active threats to your attack surface and understand what incoming traffic poses a potential threat to your network, passive network monitoring provides those benefits. Passive monitoring captures real traffic and data, analyzes it and can create a baseline of patterns in order to identify actual suspicious traffic in real time.

Assuming you have a complete inventory of active devices that run on your network, passive monitoring provides full visibility into those devices to monitor them for potential intrusion attempts.

Should an intrusion take place, passive monitoring will also be able to identify how and where, which allows for quick isolation and response.

The ability to monitor and analyze real traffic and data is what separates passive network monitoring from active monitoring when it comes to cybersecurity monitoring and attack surface management.

SecuLore’s attack surface management solution monitors all of the traffic traversing your network, analyzes user behavior and detects anomalies. It alerts our US-based SOC (security operations center) team that is staffed 24/7/365 to a potential threat in order to respond to thwart a network intrusion.

Contact our team of cybersecurity experts today to learn more about our monitoring solution to manage your attack surface. Our team and solutions are trusted by our nation’s most important number, 9-1-1, local and federal government organizations for any on-premise, hybrid, and cloud-based networks.https://seculore.com/cybersecurity-services/cybersight-soc-monitoring/