Closing Federal Network Visibility Gaps with AI-Driven NDR

Federal agencies must protect their highly targeted and complex network environments from sophisticated cyber adversaries to maintain national security. These networks span legacy data centers, cloud platforms, and mission-critical operational technology (OT) systems. Each enclave represents a disparate component of a patchwork technology ecosystem that introduces vulnerable security gaps, and adversaries are increasingly exploiting network weaknesses to exfiltrate sensitive data.

CISA’s recent Advisory AA25-239A emphasizes that the federal network edge — routers, firewalls, VPN gateways, and internet-facing servers — is vulnerable to nation-state and other advanced persistent threat (APT) actors. Upon entry, attackers frequently modify routers to maintain persistent, long-term access to networks and then move laterally to remain undetected in encrypted traffic and remote enclaves where monitoring is weakest. Unfortunately, legacy NDR solutions are incapable of effectively monitoring east-west network traffic to detect these threats in a timely manner. Coupled with evolving regulatory compliance mandates, budget cuts, and limited staff, federal agencies require a new approach to ensure their mission-critical networks are secure.

Legacy Tools and Compounding Challenges

To maintain network visibility and security, agencies have traditionally relied on packet-heavy solutions that require constant tuning, as well as inflexible hardware, appliances, taps, or mirrored feeds at each location. Considering the complexity of modern federal networks, this model creates more challenges than it solves:

• Blind spots persist: With appliances deployed only in select data centers or virtual private clouds (VPCs), vast portions of distributed networks remain unmonitored.
• Exponential operational overhead growth: Each new site requires a compounding amount of hardware, integration, and skilled staff to manage tuning and network traffic feeds.
• Encrypted traffic creates security gaps: As TLS 1.3 and VPN tunnels become the standard, packet capture and inspection results in loss of visibility without costly decryption infrastructure in place.
• Overwhelmed SOC teams: Alert fatigue, false positives, and manual triage leave analysts unable to identify critical vulnerabilities and prioritize remediation across the unmanageable network device sprawl.

Federal networks have reached a scale and complexity where traditional methods simply cannot keep up. Agencies require a solution to address mission requirements, resource constraints, and the encrypted-by-default nature of networks.

A More Efficient and Secure Model: AI-Driven Sampling

Cynamics Federal delivers an innovative approach to network detection and response tailored to the unique challenges and requirements of the U.S. Government. Instead of attempting to capture and inspect every packet, patented AI-enabled sampling analyzes less than 1% of traffic to infer complete network visibility and security posture. By analyzing only a fraction of network flows, Cynamics Federal builds a complete picture of vulnerabilities, traffic behaviors, and threat anomalies across the entire network environment.

Cynamics Federal’s NDR platform delivers immediate and tangible benefits for agencies:

• Lightweight deployment: Does not require taps, sensors, or hardware. Cynamics Federal is cloud-native, FedRAMP-authorized, and uses an adaptable virtual collector.
• Visibility across all environments: Achieve real-time monitoring across legacy on-premises systems, cloud platforms, and OT infrastructure, delivering contextual security analytics and context where legacy NDR tools fail.
• Resilience under encryption: Detect threat anomalies in TLS 1.3, VPN tunnels, and east-west data flows without requiring payload decryption.
• SOC Efficiencies: The Virtual Cyber Analyst (VCA) automates triage, prioritizes remediation, and produces actionable reports, alleviating overextended SOC teams from alert fatigue.
• Operational Cost Savings: Eliminates the need for excessive, costly bandwidth and storage requirements.
• Automated Compliance: Ensure compliance with mandates such as CISA Advisory AA25-239A, M-21-31, and M-22-09 for comprehensive visibility, event logging, and encrypted traffic monitoring.
• Real-Time Threat Detection and Response: AI-Driven triaging through CynLLM, a cybersecurity-optimized large language model, automates detection, prioritization, and response of threats as they emerge.

Future-Proofing Federal Networks with Cynamics Federal

Federal networks are only becoming more complex as IT modernization accelerates, and agencies cannot afford to rely on legacy solutions to secure their modern network architecture. To ensure network security keeps pace with evolving attacker tactics, agencies require a lightweight solution like Cynamics Federal NDR to deliver complete visibility, scale seamlessly with mission requirements, and support evolving regulatory compliance mandates. With AI-driven sampling, cloud-native deployment, and FedRAMP authorization, agencies can have the confidence that no part of their network remains unseen without the cost, complexity, or blind spots of legacy NDR tools.