Napatech updates Link Capture software to mitigate critical emerging security threats

Napatech announced a significant update to its Link Capture software that addresses a range of emerging cybersecurity threats while ensuring compliance with evolving requirements for data sovereignty.

Enterprises of all sizes and in all regions continue to be challenged by sophisticated cybersecurity data breaches, with information compiled by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services indicating that more than 98 million individuals were impacted by the 10 biggest data breaches in the first half of 2021.

Three of the 10 largest breaches impacted technology companies, with two each in healthcare and professional services. These events follow well-publicized breaches at hyperscale internet companies and major retail outlets within the past three years.

Building on close collaboration with both OEMs and enterprise security vendors, the latest release of Napatech’s Link Capture software, version 12.7, integrates new features designed to mitigate critical emerging security threats.

As one example, Packet Masking is used extensively within the healthcare and finance sectors to protect sensitive data, where non-compliance may incur severe penalties. Through this technology, social security numbers, PINs and passwords are protected by masking a specific section of the applicable network packet before forwarding it to an application.

Similarly, to ensure compliance with data protection mandates such as HIPAA and GDPR, Packet Slicing removes specific parts of a network packet, truncating it so that only protocol headers are preserved as required for network analysis.

“Napatech’s Link Capture software incorporates essential technologies for ensuring the security of networked applications within today’s evolving threat landscape,” said Jarrod J.S. Siket, CMO, Napatech. “It performs high-speed packet capture with zero packet loss, nanosecond timestamping and replay with precise inter-frame gap control, which is important when replaying captured traffic for troubleshooting or simulating traffic flows.”

In addition to the Packet Masking and Packet Slicing features, the latest Link Capture release also includes:

• Hairpinning with VLAN tagging, which enables traffic to be distributed and balanced across all available server CPU cores to ensure that the processing load is optimally distributed across the compute resources either per port, per traffic type, by flow or by a combination of these. This enables packets to be sent to multiple remote servers or appliances via a VLAN switch.
• Header stripping removes protocol layers that are not supported by an application before the packet is delivered to the host or retransmitted.
• Configurable SDRAM enables memory to be split between a packet buffer and flow table to fine-tune system performance.