Incident Response Solutions

DFIR combines digital forensics — the collection and analysis of electronic evidence — with incident response, the structured process of detecting, containing, and recovering from a security incident. Together they allow organizations to investigate breaches with evidentiary rigor and produce findings that hold up in audits or legal proceedings. Full packet capture is foundational to DFIR because it preserves complete network traffic for session reconstruction and attacker validation.

The NIST SP 800-61 incident response lifecycle has four phases: Preparation, Detection and Analysis, Containment/Eradication/Recovery, and Post-Incident Activity. Each phase depends on reliable evidence — which is where network visibility becomes critical. Full packet capture supports all four phases by giving teams verifiable data to validate alerts, scope compromises, confirm remediation, and document findings.

Investigators need full packet captures, protocol-level data, payload content, connection metadata, and historical traffic predating the first alert. Log data alone is insufficient — logs can be evaded, tampered with, or absent entirely when events fall between collection windows. Packet-level evidence provides the ground truth that lets teams answer what actually happened, not just what systems were configured to report.

Logs summarize events based on what systems are configured to report; packet capture records every byte of network traffic regardless. For incident response, logs establish that something happened — packets reveal exactly what. When logs are cleared or tampered with, packet capture provides independent, tamper-resistant evidence. The two approaches are complementary: logs provide fast alerting, packets provide forensic depth.

Full packet capture accelerates incident response by enabling analysts to retrieve and replay specific sessions from stored PCAP files in near real time, across petabytes of retained data. This eliminates the manual reconstruction work that slows investigations when only logs or flow summaries are available. SentryWire indexes packets at capture time so retrieval is immediate regardless of retention depth.

Extended packet retention is vital because intrusions often go unnoticed for weeks or months. SentryWire preserves network traffic for long periods, enabling forensic review of older data and complete investigations even when logs or alerts have expired.

OMB M-21-31 requires 30 months of retention for high-impact federal systems. NERC-CIP requires three years for critical infrastructure operators. For organizations without a specific mandate, best practice is a minimum of 90 days of searchable packet data, recognizing that APT intrusions often go undetected for months before investigation begins.

Most ICS/OT devices cannot run endpoint agents without risking operational disruption, making network-based visibility the only viable monitoring approach. Full packet capture provides passive, non-intrusive observation of ICS/OT traffic — detecting protocol anomalies, unauthorized commands, and lateral movement between IT and OT segments without touching the devices. It also provides the forensic evidence required for NERC-CIP regulatory reporting.

Yes. SentryWire enables faster APT detection by allowing retroactive, signature-based searches on stored data. Analysts can uncover hidden threat behaviors using new intelligence, identifying stealthy "living off the land" activity that often evades endpoint detection tools.

No. SentryWire provides the packet-level network data and forensic evidence that incident response teams rely on to investigate, validate, and respond to security incidents. It complements SIEM, SOAR, NDR, and endpoint tools rather than replacing them.