How does a network administrator know for sure if individuals on the network are not violating social media policies on usage?

That's a question that Anapolis, MD-based startup Netography is looking to help organizations answer. Netography today announced the launch of a new capability for its Fusion platform that provides organizations with improved network visibility into social media traffic.

The Netography Fusion platform can now help network administrators and security professionals identify if there have been any violations of network usage policy due to social media access. Netography positions itself as a network detection and response (NDR) vendor, and raised $45 million in a Series A round of funding in November 2021. Netography competes against multiple vendors in the space including ExtraHop, Gigamon and Darktrace.

"We're taking the network layer information, so layer three and four, and we're overlaying the application and user information," Matt Wilson, VP of product management at Netography told SDxCentral. "We apply a lot of additional information to that and we do it in real time."

Social media use within different industries is a governance and compliance issue. For example, in December 2022, the U.S. government formally banned the use of social media platform TikTok on U.S. government devices.

Network and security administrators have long had tools and configuration options available to them that can block certain sites and services, but for just as long, there have been different ways that users have bypassed those controls. Netography's social media update is an attempt to provide new visibility to show network and security administrators what is actually happening on a network in terms of social media traffic. The operational dashboard that the Netography Fusion platform offers provides real time notifications of when policy violations occur on social media usage.

Wilson noted that there are people within organizations who should be using social media and there are those that should not.

"The guy running the machine on the floor, really shouldn't be using the SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) network computer to be surfing TikTok for three hours at night," Wilson said.

Wilson said that there are a lot of things that an organization defines as part of governance and controls that are put in place, but it's critical to be able to visualize what is actually happening. He added that Netography's social media updates are a way of helping to prove the governance policies are being adhered to and that all of the controls are actually working as expected.

When things don't go as expected and there is a violation, the Netography system will generate an alert on the incident. Wilson explained that the system will be able to identify the offending host that has violated the policy. What Netography won't be able to do is actually tell the organization what was shared or said in social media, as that data is often encrypted. Rather the system will just be able to identify that a violation of usage policy has occurred and help the organization to take remediative action to fix the bypassed control.

"They [the network administrator] can get more information to find out what was the path on  the network that the user took and what firewall the traffic went through that might be missing the appropriate policies," Wilson said. "It's all about helping to better identify where there is a control in the network that is faulty."