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CybersecurityLogical SecuritySecurity Education & Training

Silence in the Logs: Are Organizations Missing Signs of a Breach?

By Jerry Mancini
Golden lights

Joshua Sortino via Unsplash

July 3, 2025

For organizations entrusted with sensitive customer data — including financial institutions, retailers, and government agencies — a breach is more than an inconvenience; it threatens their credibility, finances, and operational stability. After a steady stream of high-profile breaches in recent years, averaging an alarming $4.88 million in 2024, many question whether they have the right tools and processes to catch hackers before their data leaves the network. 

So, how do successful hackers go unnoticed until after the damage is already done? The most sophisticated cyberattacks are stealthy and persistent. With attackers able to lurk undetected for months, security teams often need to retrace attackers’ steps on the network to understand how a breach happened and to prevent future attacks. Logs from various sources, including firewalls, applications, and network devices, can show a broad overview of activity but lack detail and nuance, providing an incomplete picture. Equipped with only this data, threat hunters can miss signs of a breach. 

Everyday Incidents Can Turn Into Enterprise-Wide Breaches

According to a recent IBM report, stolen credentials are the leading cause of data breaches, accounting for 16% of all incidents, often addressed with little more than a password reset. However, once attackers obtain credentials, they gain deep access to an organization’s network, where they can install malware, steal sensitive data, or disrupt operations. 

Spam emails pose a similar threat. Though easy to dismiss, they’re more dangerous than they appear, especially with AI agents making it easier to launch convincing, low-cost attacks. A single malicious attachment or phishing attempt can give an attacker a foothold, turning one ill-thought-out click into the start of a significant breach.

Yet traditional defenses can easily miss both of these examples. Successfully protecting the massive volumes of data under modern organizations’ care hinges on a better, deeper understanding of activity on their network. 

Why Logs Aren’t Enough to Catch a Breach

While traditional security logs can flag anomalies like traffic spikes, failed logins, or changes in access permissions, they often lack the critical context that security teams need to identify suspicious or unfamiliar network activity. 

Even when details like the timing and volume of data exfiltrated are captured, they rarely reveal the exact nature of what compromised data was shared or how attackers initially bypassed security measures. Thus, organizations are missing the pieces to understand the root cause of the infiltration, such as via stolen credentials, supply chain attacks, or zero-day exploits. Without these essential details, they can’t properly respond, and the attackers can continue their mission hidden, unnoticed and undeterred. 

Network data — specifically packets, enriched and stored for long-term analysis — offers the best way to fill these gaps and provide critical, actionable intelligence. With packet-level observability across the network, stored for weeks or months at a time, threat hunters can put together a forensic accounting of each sequence of attacks and configure security systems in their firewalls, SIEM/SOARs, and other critical toolsets to automatically respond to similar activity in the future.  

Uncovering the Hidden Language of Attackers Through Granular Traffic Analysis

Attackers don’t start by stealing information. They begin by quietly slipping through systems, moving laterally across the network without setting off alarms. That’s why a clear view of network traffic matters. With enhanced network observability, rooted in comprehensive deep packet inspection, security teams can investigate subtle movements and respond to threats that traditional defenses miss. 

Deep packet inspection (DPI) analyzes the actual data payload moving through the network. For example, DPI examines application-layer data to identify specific content like traffic patterns, file types, specific URLs, and domains, providing a granular view of network activity. It can distinguish legitimate traffic from command-and-control communications, uncover the frequency of connections, and detect hidden instructions in payloads.  

DPI also establishes a baseline of normal traffic behavior, making it easier to detect when something’s off, troubleshoot network performance issues, and ensure data integrity. This allows for proactive anomaly detection, blocking suspicious activity, and uncovering the full context of an attack. 

By contrast, other forms of packet monitoring, such as header-based packet inspection and flow-based monitoring, primarily examine metadata. While header inspection can identify malicious IP addresses or unusual ports, and flow monitoring summarizes conversations, both packet monitoring types miss the content being communicated and often aren’t stored long-term. This limited observability can hinder threat hunters who need to reference months of stored network metadata to thoroughly investigate threats, leaving them less equipped than teams with more comprehensive network data. 

In summary, because attackers often cover their tracks and move quietly once they breach defenses, security teams must rethink their approach. By understanding attacker tools and techniques from a network perspective, they can respond faster and make more informed decisions, addressing threats missed by conventional defenses or invisible in the logs. After all, no company wants to deal with the aftermath of a breach and risk losing stolen customer financial information or company files. 

With this in mind, security teams must ask if they are at risk of missing something in their logs, and if so, are they looking deeper into packet data? The answers lie in the network, so it’s time to look closer. 

KEYWORDS: breaches network

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Jerry Mancini is Senior Director, Office of the CTO at NETSCOUT. Image courtesy of Mancini 

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