The ACC has a wealth of information that you can use as a starting point for analyzing network traffic. Let’s look at an example on using the ACC to uncover events of interest. This example illustrates how you can use the ACC to ensure that legitimate users can be held accountable for their actions, detect and track unauthorized activity, and detect and diagnose compromised hosts and vulnerable systems on your network.

The widgets and filters in the ACC give you the capability to analyze the data and filter the views based on events of interest or concern. You can trace events that pique your interest, directly export a PDF of a tab, access the raw logs, and save a personalized view of the activity that you want to track. These capabilities make it possible for you to monitor activity and develop policies and countermeasures for fortifying your network against malicious activity. In this section, you will Interact with the ACC widgets across different tabs, drill down using widget filters, and pivot the ACC views using global filters, and export a PDF for sharing with incidence response or IT teams.

At first glance, you see the Application Usage and User Activity widgets in the ACCNetwork Activity tab. The User Activity widget shows that user Marsha Wirth has transferred 154 Megabytes of data during the last hour. This volume is nearly six times more than any other user on the network. To see the trend over the past few hours, expand the Time period to the Last 6 Hrs, and now Marsha’s activity has been 1.7 Gigabytes over 1,500 sessions and has triggered 455 threats signatures.

Because Marsha has transferred a large volume of data, apply her username as a global filter (ACC Filters) and pivot all the views in the ACC to Marsha’s traffic activity.

The Application Usage tab now shows that the top application that Martha used was rapidshare, a Swiss-owned file-hosting site that belongs to the file-sharing URL category. For further investigation, add rapidshare as a global filter, and view Marsha’s activity in the context of rapidshare.

To view which IP addresses Marsha has communicated with, check the Destination IP Activity widget, and view the data by bytes and by URLs.

To find out which countries Marsha communicated with, sort on sessions in the Destination Regions widget.

From this data, you can confirm that Marsha, a user on your network, has established sessions in Canada, Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. She logged 2 threats in her sessions with each destination country.

To look at Marsha’s activity from a threat perspective, remove the global filter for rapidshare.

In the Threat Activity widget on the Threat Activity tab, view the threats. The widget displays that her activity had triggered a match for 452 vulnerabilities in the brute force, information leak, portable executable (PE) and spyware threat category. Several of these vulnerabilities are of critical severity.

To further drill-down into each vulnerability, click into the graph and narrow the scope of your investigation. Each click automatically applies a local filter on the widget.

To investigate each threat by name, you can create a global filter for say, WordPress Login Brute Force Attack. Then, view the User Activity widget in the Network Activity tab. The tab is automatically filtered to display threat activity for Marsha (notice the global filters in the screenshot).

Notice that this Microsoft code-execution vulnerability was triggered over email, by the imap application. You can now establish that Martha has IE vulnerabilities and email attachment vulnerabilities, and perhaps her computer needs to be patched. You can now either navigate to the Blocked Threats widget in the Blocked Activity tab to check how many of these vulnerabilities were blocked.

Or, you can check the Rule Usage widget on the Network Activity tab to discover how many vulnerabilities made it into your network and which security rule allowed this traffic, and navigate directly to the security rule using the Global Find capability.

Then, drill into the attackers using web-browsing to attack target destination. Consider modifying the security policy rule to restrict these malicious IP addresses or more narrowly defining which IP addresses can access your network resources.

To review if any threats were logged over web-browsing, check Marsha’s activity in the WildFire Activity by Application widget in the Threat Activity tab. You can confirm that Marsha had no malicious activity, but to verify that other no other user was compromised by the web-browsing application, negate Marsha as a global filter and look for other users who triggered threats over web-browsing.

Click into the bar for imap in the graph and drill into the inbound threats associated with the application. To find out who an IP address is registered to, hover over the attacker IP address and select the Who Is link in the drop-down.

Because the session count from this IP address is high, check the Blocked Content and Blocked Threats widgets in the Blocked Activity tab for events related to this IP address. The Blocked Activity tab allows you to validate whether or not your policy rules are effective in blocking content or threats when a host on your network is compromised.

Use the Export PDF capability on the ACC to export the current view (create a snapshot of the data) and send it to an incidence response team. To view the threat logs directly from the widget, you can also click the icon to jump to the logs; the query is generated automatically and only the relevant logs are displayed onscreen (for example in MonitorLogsThreat Logs).

You have now used the ACC to review network data/trends to find which applications or users are generating the most traffic, and how many application are responsible for the threats seen on the network. You were able to identify which application(s), user(s) generated the traffic, determine whether the application was on the default port, and which policy rule(s) allowed the traffic into the network, and determine whether the threat is spreading laterally on the network. You also identified the destination IP addresses, geo-locations with which hosts on the network are communicating with. Use the conclusions from your investigation to craft goal-oriented policies that can secure users and your network.