This is perfectly possible, and very feasible for many environments.
In fact, I do it routinely. It's part of the Network Security
Monitoring methodology. Most NSM practitioners collect IDS alerts,
network session information and pcaps, subject to data retention
policies and available storage of course.
If you want to learn more, check out Richard Bejtlich's book, "The
Tao of Network Security Monitoring." There's also an open source
NSM suite which can help you collect an analyze all this data:
The Sguil project at http://www.sguil.org (of which I am a member).
Personally, I've been collecting pcaps for quite some time now, and I
can't imagine having to do my job without that. I'm a lot more
efficient when I can simply go back to "the source" and check to see
exactly what happened.
David
xelerated wrote:
Im posrting this to the pen-test group, rather than firewall or IDS
because it covers many areas.
Id like to see what the pro's think about capturing and storing packet
payloads from firewalls, ids, etc... everything rather than just
loggin the incidents.
Im trying to explain to my management how useful the payloads could be
if we were ever to
really need them, say from a forensics point of view.
To give another example, one time I was seeing lots of firewall drops,
I could tell what ports, src and dest. but no packet data. To everyone
involved it looked like a worm trying to spread.
Well in the end it wasnt, infact is was something that was nice to
know about, but it was not hostile traffic. But if I had been able to
see the payloads i could have seen the data request and known from the
start what it was, or was not.
What would be really great, is a whitepaper covering this, or enough
info/facts that I could throw one together.
thanks!
Chris
C|EH, CISSP
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