Detecting anomalous network patterns

COVID has hit everyone and affected people in their own way. As far as organizations are concerned, employees have been asked to work from home (WFH), and because many industries are now working remotely, the pattern of user connections to the enterprise network has turned upside down. Instead of most users connecting locally, now most are connecting remotely. And for allowing employees to access critical business functions, there is mandatory VPN connectivity.

Since the VPN instance is kept in a demilitarized zone (DMZ) to allow employees around the globe to connect to it and access internal applications, there is an unexpected flood of WFH connections, which makes VPN networks more vulnerable to all kinds of Layer7/Layer3 attacks.

We will walk through how we have strengthened security and monitoring over our public VPN instance, which was kept in the public VPC, keeping an ever-watchful eye out for unusual traffic patterns or content that could signify a network intrusion using AWS VPC Traffic Mirroring and a network intrusion detection system Suricata.