The Critical Importance of Unified Visibility in Cybersecurity

I’m at my desk — third cup of coffee kicking in — thinking about how much we’ve come to rely on networking since the early days. Back in ’93, when I was on my belly on network room floors tending muxes that carried voice and data in and out of the public telephone network, security meant more or less not plugging things in, and not letting strangers walk in and work on your computer. Fast forward to today, and I’m running my own cybersecurity company, and if there’s one takeaway, it’s that visibility is king. No matter how hard you want to get shot of this, you’ve got to keep it up. Without it, you’re flying blind. Truly, you’re just praying that your defense holds.

Visibility Gaps

Here’s the rub: most companies consider wired and wireless networks as two separate galaxies. And why not? They’ve matured in isolation — wired infrastructure has its own types of hardware, configurations, and monitoring tools. Wireless, in contrast, dances to a different beat, teeming with unpredictable clients and devices that move around. But threats don’t care. Malware, advanced persistent threats, even something as simple as credential theft — they span both worlds with ease.

I know that when were having the nightmare weeks of the Slammer worm running rampant, it wasn’t the fact a simple exploit spread so quickly on wired servers, but when you watched that same exploitation spread across the wireless clients. The root cause then? Unified visibility of threats, etc. You had your wired logs here, your wireless logs there, and no single pane of glass to put the pieces together. Firewalls allowing or rejecting both traffic and no consolidated analytics. No real-time context.

Fast forward to today, and well, it’s better, but not great. But there are gaps, which mean that SOC teams are constantly chasing their tails.

Integrations and Fabric Fortinet

Let me be clear: integration is not some optional nice to have. In security, it’s a lifeline. And the Fortinet Fabric is not taking this lightly. It ropes in many things: FortiGate, FortiAuthenticator, endpoints, cloud… You get the idea. This results in logs from wired firewalls and wireless authentications showing up in the same location.

FortiGate Analytics Plus with logs from FortiAuthenticator? That’s the crux of unified visibility.

Here’s the thing:

• With FortiGate you’ll be able to retrieve extensive traffic logs from wire and wireless access points.
• FortiAuthenticator adds identity into the mix – identifying users with pinpoint accuracy.
• They all feed into FortiGate Analytics Plus for centralized inspection.

This correlation is leveraged by PJ Networks’ SOC in real time for all of your network vectors. Since without identity and traffic together, you can only hear half of the conversation.

I recently worked on swapping out three banks’ zero trust architecture with literally this setup. Combining those logs with network traffic has put their SOC teams ahead of the curve. Types of red flags once overlooked are now identified in real time.

Dashboards

Dashboards now, love ‘em or hate ‘em, are often where the rubber meets the road. And they matter a lot when you need to make fast judgments in a high-stakes situation.

FortiGate Analytics Plus dashboards offer:

• Combined status views wired and wireless traffic together.
• Identity Overlays connects and traffic to see who is connecting and generating traffic.
• Drill-down into the list of devices reported with suspicious activities.
• Customizable alerts that eliminate noise but never miss a critical threat.

At the beginning of my SOC, dashboards were a complete mess, with spreadsheets and alerts thrown together. Now? One screen, one click — and you’re done. It’s as if you were moving from a rotary phone to a touch-screen smartphone.

But dashboards aren’t magic. They need to be tweaked, and they are not set and forget. Quarterly health checks on these systems are performed here at PJ Networks to ensure they remain relevant and worthwhile. Logs pile up fast. If you don’t tune your alerts precisely, your team will spend all day tracking down false positives and overlook the real ones.

Example Walk-through: Rogue Wireless Access Point Detection

Here’s a real-world-usable example from the trenches — or at least it’s something I hit on just last month.

We have an enterprise client who is constantly paranoid about rogue APs. You know, those shady little boxes that someone throws in a closet or hides behind a desk to illicitly use the wireless network.

By using FortiGate and FortiAuthenticator integration, the SOC:

• Anomaly detection for AP broadcasts on the wireless medium.
• Match them up to authentication logs of strange devices attempting to connect.
• Automatically generate alerts with the user and device context, so the security team could see which device it was, where on the network it was and who potentially put it there.

All of this simply would not have been doable, if logs would not have been merged and analyzed in a single pane.

The action was immediate — physical inspection of equipment, blacklisting of unauthorized hardware, and suspending credentials. A close call avoided.

PJ Networks SOC and Beyond

For PJ Networks, the addition of these Fortinet products to our Managed Detection and Response MDR offering has been transformational. The MDR team needs an integrated aggregation bridge that can pull threat data from wired and wireless dimensions without overlapping log correlations.

Our approach includes:

• Consolidate all that FortiGate and FortiAuthenticator logging into our SOC platform.
• Routine health checks and tuning to optimize detection rules and reduce noise.
• Hunting threat by active seeing data of both sides of network.

I’ve been doing this since, like, the early 2000s. Observed the evolution — from perimeter bullets that were relatively easy to dodge to today’s multi-vector threat landscapes. And believe me, you need a single integrated view if you are going to successfully get ahead of attacks.

Oh, and by the way—just returned from DefCon. I’m still mad about the hardware hacking village. I forgot how attackers are no longer virtual. They mess with physical things that cross the boundaries of the wired, wireless, and hardware attack domains. Visibility and analytics must adapt or they will not have time to be skirted.

Quick Take

• Complete threat visibility across both wired and wireless is necessary for proper detection — wired and wireless cannot be disparate.
• FortiGate Analytics Plus + FortiAuthenticator = single pane SOC view.
• Dashboards need to be fine tuned for this not to contribute to alert fatigue.
• Real-world victories catching rogue APs before it was too late.
• MDR and zero-trust enhancements Use this configuration with PJ Networks.

Final Thoughts

Here’s a hot take it might get controversial up in here: I’m not buying into all of this AI-Powered security hype. AI helps, no doubt about that — but if you lack in robust integrations and visibility into the fundamentals of your customers, all that AI buys you is a fancy blender with nothing to blend. It cannot hot take you to your cybersecurity meal alone.

Visibility first. Analytics second. AI third if at all.

So if you’re still treating wired and wireless logs separately or, worse, using different dashboards, it’s time for you to face your own coffee-fueled come-to-Jesus moment. Integrate. Correlate. Monitor. For the reason that, in cybersecurity, what you don’t know can — and will — bite you.

Until then – stay frosty, tune those dashboards, and keep an eye on those pesky devices. Your SOC will thank you.

— Sanjay Seth, P J Networks Pvt Ltd