Full Packet Capture for Threat Hunting
SentryWire is an enterprise-grade full packet capture appliance built for regulated, high-value networks that require total visibility, long-term retention, and uncompromised forensic detail. It delivers long-term retention of full packet data, ensuring complete, high-fidelity visibility across enterprise networks.
Why Full Packet Capture Is Critical for Threat Hunting
Modern threat hunting solutions rely on complete visibility across network activity. Full packet capture delivers that visibility by recording every packet, preserving session content, and enabling analysts to identify threats that log-based systems often miss.
Unlike proprietary solutions, SentryWire runs on commodity hardware, making it up to 40% more cost-effective than legacy packet capture platforms while maintaining enterprise throughput and retention. SentryWire also supports 10Gbps+ traffic capture, ensuring enterprise teams can maintain zero-loss retention even in high-throughput environments.
What Are Threat Hunting Solutions?
Threat hunting solutions are designed to help analysts proactively identify hidden or emerging threats that have not yet triggered traditional detection systems. Unlike reactive alerting, threat hunting involves:
Developing hypotheses
Reviewing traffic behavior
Identifying anomalies that may indicate early compromise
Effective threat hunting depends on data that captures complete network activity rather than relying on summarized metadata.
SentryWire supports the full lifecycle of threat hunting by delivering complete packet capture for forensic replay, deep inspection, and long-term analysis. Full packet capture complements SIEM and EDR platforms by supplying raw data that validates alerts and reveals activity that logs may overlook.
Challenges in Modern Threat Detection
Modern networks generate more data, more telemetry, and more attack surface than ever before. Yet most security tools still struggle to provide the depth and continuity analysts need to detect stealthy threats and validate what actually occurred.
Fragmented Visibility Across Distributed Environments
As networks span data centers, cloud platforms, remote users, and OT systems, traditional monitoring often produces incomplete visibility. Metadata-only logs, short retention windows, and tool-specific blind spots make it difficult to see the full scope of network behavior.
Blind Spots Created by Encryption and Lateral Movement
Attackers increasingly rely on encrypted channels, credentialed access, and east-west movement to remain undetected. These low-noise techniques generate minimal log evidence, leaving analysts with only fragments of activity to investigate.
Limited Forensic Detail During Incident Response
When suspicious behavior is finally detected, many organizations lack the packet-level detail required to answer essential questions: what happened, when it began, and which systems or data were affected. Partial telemetry forces teams to infer events instead of validating them.
SentryWire’s Threat Hunting Solutions
Modern threat hunting demands complete, uncompromised visibility into network activity. SentryWire provides analysts with the packet-level evidence, speed, and analytical depth required to proactively uncover hidden threats and validate behaviors with confidence.
Complete Visibility for Confident Investigation
SentryWire records every packet — headers and payloads — giving analysts full-fidelity evidence for proactive hunting. Instead of relying on partial logs, teams can review exact communication sequences and validate suspicious behavior with precision. SentryWire includes built-in Network Security Monitoring capabilities, allowing teams to analyze traffic, detect anomalies, and correlate events without deploying additional appliances.
High-Speed Search for Faster Threat Discovery
The platform scales search with compute, allowing analysts to query petabytes of traffic in minutes. Rapid retrieval makes it possible to pivot quickly across indicators, correlate patterns, and uncover hidden activity that traditional tools miss.
Session Reconstruction and Packet Carving
SentryWire rebuilds full sessions from raw packets and supports packet carving to isolate artifacts and payloads. These capabilities help threat hunters follow attacker workflows, analyze malware delivery paths, and understand the full narrative behind anomalies.
File Extraction and Advanced Inspection
With complete packet retention, SentryWire enables immediate extraction of transferred files for malware analysis or behavioral review. Analysts can confirm whether suspicious files were executed, staged, or exfiltrated.
Scalable Performance in High-Volume Environments
SentryWire maintains line-rate capture even during heavy network activity, ensuring no loss of critical evidence. Its architecture supports large datasets, accurate time stamping, and uninterrupted visibility across demanding enterprise networks.
Integrated Visualization for Rapid Pattern Recognition
Built-in visualization tools and external analytics integrations allow teams to map relationships, identify unusual flows, and detect deviations in behavior. These visual layers accelerate threat-hunting workflows and reduce time spent parsing raw data.
Core Capabilities That Strengthen Enterprise Security
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SentryWire captures complete traffic across IT infrastructure, OT networks, and industrial control systems, giving teams a consistent view of communication flows in complex environments. This helps identify unauthorized access, anomalous behavior, and misconfigurations that traditional monitoring tools often overlook. The platform is purpose-built for environments where packet loss is unacceptable — including power grids, manufacturing facilities, telecom systems, and federal networks.
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Zero-loss capture and extended retention enable analysts to trace activity across months of traffic and reconstruct multi-stage behaviors with accuracy. Sessionized storage makes it easier to correlate events between separate network segments and understand how actions progressed across hybrid architectures.
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SentryWire integrates with SIEM, IDS, and analytics tools, allowing analysts to correlate alerts with packet-level evidence. These integrations help streamline investigations, improve detection accuracy, and maintain efficient SOC workflows. Teams can pivot from log analysis to packet review without interruption, which reduces investigative delays.
The platform’s interoperability supports diverse technology environments and enhances automated detection systems by providing additional context for correlation engines.
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Beyond security, SentryWire supports performance and connectivity analysis by allowing teams to review packet behavior directly. Packet-level visibility helps diagnose latency issues, unstable connections, protocol failures, or other performance irregularities, enabling network and security teams to collaborate more effectively.
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SentryWire supports compliance requirements across SOC2, HIPAA, OMB M-21-31, SEC 17a-4, and NERC-CIP by preserving full packet data with accurate timestamps and defensible chain-of-custody controls. This ensures security and compliance teams always have unaltered forensic evidence available for audits and regulatory inquiries.
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Organizations can deploy SentryWire across on-premises, hybrid, or air gapped environments. Its architecture supports scalability across multi-site monitoring programs and high-performance networks. This flexibility allows teams to maintain consistent visibility regardless of operational constraints or infrastructure design.
SentryWire’s adaptability makes it suitable for enterprises, defense systems, and organizations managing complex or regulated environments.
Why SentryWire for Threat Hunting
SentryWire is built for high-throughput environments where complete visibility and reliable evidence matter. The platform delivers lossless packet capture, long-term retention, and consistent performance at enterprise scale, ensuring investigations are based on complete, trustworthy data.
Organizations choose SentryWire for threat hunting because it provides full forensic depth without the cost or rigidity of proprietary hardware, supporting security operations, digital forensics, and compliance readiness across complex environments.
Request a demo to see how SentryWire supports enterprise threat hunting with complete packet-level visibility and dependable performance.
FAQs
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Full packet capture provides tamper-resistant network evidence that attackers cannot alter, unlike logs that can be wiped or changed. SentryWire records full packets with payloads, enabling forensic replay and deep inspection that uncover threats missed by log-based monitoring.
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SentryWire enables retroactive, signature-based searches on stored packet data to find threats revealed by new indicators. It captures complete network conversations without truncation and integrates Suricata IDS for real-time alerts and long-term packet visibility, improving detection of stealthy adversaries.
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SentryWire stores weeks to years of network traffic, allowing analysts to revisit packet data and search petabytes in minutes. Its extended retention supports long-term forensics, enabling full session reconstruction and artifact extraction through an intuitive, web-based interface.
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SentryWire enables faster APT detection by providing complete packet data across entire networks, even against zero-day exploits. Its full capture exposes “living off the land” techniques that evade endpoint tools, making it indispensable for comprehensive APT analysis and investigation.
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SentryWire scales to capture 1 Mbps–1 Tbps traffic with lossless performance using a distributed architecture. Its Hadoop-like design supports over 100 PB of searchable data while reducing costs by half, delivering enterprise-scale retention and forensic-grade packet visibility.
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Whether you’re exploring full packet capture for the first time or looking to optimize your current network visibility, our experts are here to help.