AI Traffic Detection

Network Visibility Brings AI Into Focus — and the Other Way Around 

It’s no secret that the use of AI and volume of AI-generated traffic continues to skyrocket – but where exactly is that growth taking place? What tools are people using and how?

How are generative AI (GenAI) and new computer-using agents (CUAs) being trained or training themselves? And perhaps most important: Where exactly is the traffic going and is it protected by security controls the entire time?

Can we keep productivity, data security, and compliance in balance?

Every day, employees find new ways to leverage AI tools like Copilot and ChatGPT to complete tasks faster with less manual effort — and rightly so. AI is the epitome of a ‘game-changer.’

But with overall data volumes and the percentage of network traffic that’s enhanced by AI surging, businesses need new strategies for detecting and controlling the use of AI in their networks and applications. Examples of data monitoring capabilities that need to keep track of what’s going on with AI inside your company include:

• Data Security Posture Management or DSPM that continuously finds and assesses risk whether data is at rest or in motion in any environment — cloud, SaaS, IaaS, on-premises
• Better-established DLP (Data Loss Prevention) tools that monitor data in use — or in motion — to make suresensitive data doesn’t leave your organization without IT knowing about it

AI Introduces Multiple Risks

The use of GenAI and emerging agentic AI technology (that gives tools even more access and power to manipulate data) creates three types of new risk for IT, security, and compliance leaders:

• Employees could inadvertently expose sensitive data to prompts or open tools that use your data to train themselves and generate responses seen outside the company. For example, someone in HR could inadvertently expose sensitive payroll or employee health data while using tools like Copilot and ChatGPT to calculate raises.

• GenAI tools have also been known to “hallucinate” and provide erroneous or misleading information that might put users at risk or subject your organization to liability and public ridicule.
• Unauthorized use of lesser-known AI tools in particular leads to ‘shadow’ AI that flies under IT’s radar and potentially subjects your company to digital exposure, compliance breaches, and again, bad press.

However it happens, unintended data leakage may violate data privacy mandates and lead to your company incurring fines for non-compliance, loss of brand trust and customer loyalty, and steep hikes in cyber insurance premiums. Avoiding these negatives outcomes relies on having complete visibility and reliable, real-time monitoring and detection for threats and anomalies.

Real-time data monitoring and security tools might struggle to keep up with the sheer speed and scale of inspecting traffic generated by AI, particularly when they also have to decrypt traffic to see inside the packets. Failure to keep pace with growth could lead to two undesirable extremes — failure to detect the presence of AI, or generating too many false positives which slows down data classification, investigations, incident response, and remediation times.

With the stakes higher than ever, the need for deep, packet-level network visibility grows more obvious and urgent than ever before.

Keysight Network Visibility Ensures Monitoring Keeps Up with AI

A Keysight Network Visibility Platform:

• Detects the presence and use of AI in your network
• Performs decryption to ensure you can inspect every relevant packet inside and out, from the header to the payload
• Delivers analysis-ready real-time network data to monitoring and security tools
• Accelerates and optimizes the process of discovering, classifying, investigating, and remediating threats and anomalies
• Helps ensure your handling of data complies with company, federal, and industry regulations

AI Detect addresses new risks and regulations  

By viewing traffic down to the packet level, a Keysight visibility platform adds a vital piece of the puzzle needed to secure and enhance your organization’s government and compliance practices.

Inspecting data packets, the ultimate source of truth, helps to show where data is going, satisfy internal and regulatory compliance audits, and meet Zero Trust security goals and mandates (prescribed by HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, NYDFS, and others) for protecting privileged information.

Your visibility platform should go beyond helping to find threats to also help you see where your data is going, a critical part of monitoring AI usage. Keysight packet brokers running AppStack software with AI Detect capabilities find and alert on an expanded set of application signatures, including indicators that specify AI traffic types. Today, AppStack detects and categorizes roughly three dozen GenAI signatures including traffic associated with Open AI’s ChatGPT, Deepseek, and Microsoft Copilot. Vision NPBs also decrypt traffic if needed to pass on the raw data onto monitoring tools for analysis.

Enhanced visibility delivers insight and scale

Whether monitoring tools are AI-enabled or not, Keysight Network Packet Brokers (NPBs) help recognize and detect AI so you can:

• Track the growth and usage of AI tools by employees and other users
• Ensure usage adheres to corporate policies and guidelines governing the use of tools like Copilot and ChatGPT  
• Prevent data leakage that can lead to bad publicity, steep fines, and higher insurance premiums
• Improve monitoring tool utilization and ROI

Real-time visibility provides a foundation for building mature practices like DSPM to evolve your security and compliance strategies as AI reimagines the future. But as always, maximizing the value of your investments depends on how well and quickly you implement and integrate visibility and monitoring.

1+1=3: Fusing Visibility and Monitoring of AI

Along with detecting dozens of AI signatures in play within your workforce and organization, AI-enhanced Keysight packet brokers also introduce next-level operational efficiencies. Keysight’s Application Fusion Program allows the industry’s leading AI-enabled performance and security monitoring solutions to run as software onboard visibility appliances to reduce your overall hardware and integration overhead.

Less configuration and fewer redundant admin portals promote faster detection and response in less time, with less effort, and at lower cost. Learn more about Keysight’s AI-enhanced packet brokers the Application Fusion Program.

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