As digital ecosystems expand and networks grow faster, organizations are racing to adopt 400G (400 Gigabits per second) technology. These ultra-fast networks are the backbone of innovations like 5G, cloud computing, and AI-driven services. However, while the performance gains are clear, many organizations have not yet addressed a critical challenge that comes with this leap in speed: how to adapt threat hunting strategies to match the pace and complexity of 400G environments.
Threat hunting is the practice of proactively seeking out threats before they cause harm, often identifying subtle indicators of compromise that traditional detection methods miss. But at 400G, the scale and velocity of network traffic can quickly overwhelm existing tools and processes. Without purpose-built visibility and analytics, organizations risk falling behind as attackers become faster, stealthier, and more difficult to detect.
400G Is Already Here and Growing
Contrary to the belief that 400G is a future concern, it’s already being adopted across major sectors. Hyperscale cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have integrated 400G into their internal infrastructure to handle massive east-west traffic within and between data centers. Telecommunications companies like Verizon, AT&T, and Orange are leveraging 400G to support 5G backhaul and core network upgrades, meeting growing consumer and enterprise bandwidth demands.
Government and intelligence agencies are also investing heavily in 400G technology to support data-intensive missions, AI processing, and advanced intercept operations. Meanwhile, financial institutions, global trading firms, and large enterprises are deploying 400G links to reduce latency and support real-time, high-frequency data transfers. These aren’t isolated trials, these are full-scale rollouts, and they are happening now. For security teams, that means the need to adapt is not theoretical—it’s immediate.
Why 400G Breaks Traditional Threat Hunting
At 400G speeds, the very foundation of traditional threat hunting begins to collapse. One of the primary challenges is visibility—networks operating at this scale move nearly 50 gigabytes of data every second, overwhelming legacy packet capture and monitoring tools that simply weren’t built for this kind of throughput. The result is an increasing number of blind spots, where malicious activity can go undetected.
Even when visibility exists, the volume of data strains analysis tools and backend infrastructure. Many SIEM and NDR platforms struggle to ingest, process, and correlate events in real time when dealing with the sheer velocity and volume that 400G introduces. This delay can lead to detections that are too late—or worse, missed entirely.
The rise in encrypted traffic also compounds the issue. As more traffic becomes cloaked under protocols like TLS 1.3, threat hunters lose visibility into payloads, making deep packet inspection ineffective. When this encrypted traffic flows through a high-speed backbone, attackers have a golden opportunity to exfiltrate data or maintain persistence without triggering alerts.
To make matters more complex, east-west traffic—the internal traffic moving laterally between servers or devices—becomes significantly harder to monitor in these environments. Traditional security tools are typically deployed at the perimeter and focused on north-south traffic. This architectural blind spot creates a dangerous gap, where lateral movement, privilege escalation, and stealthy reconnaissance activities can take place undetected.
Building a 400G-Ready Threat Hunting Strategy
To thrive in this high-speed landscape, organizations need a modern threat hunting approach that prioritizes scalability, visibility, and intelligence.
- Deploy High-Speed Network Visibility Solutions – The first step is non-intrusive, out-of-band visibility that can tap into 400G links without degrading performance. Tools that offer the ability to extract metadata, session information, and filtered traffic from 400G streams—give hunters critical insights without capturing every packet.
- Use Metadata to Power Hunting – Rather than relying on full packet captures, modern threat hunting should focus on rich metadata: IP headers, protocol usage, DNS queries, connection durations, and encrypted session details.
With this metadata, threat hunters can:
- Reconstruct events
- Spot anomalies
- Track C2 communication
- Detect lateral movement
- Filter and Forward Only What’s Relevant – Smart packet brokers must slice, filter, and forward only the traffic that matters—whether that’s known indicators of compromise, encrypted flows without SNI, or suspicious protocol usage.
This lightens the load on SIEMs and NDR platforms and keeps visibility manageable even at 400G speeds.
- Integrate with Detection & Analytics Platforms – Threat hunting works best when visibility tools integrate directly with security platforms like:
- SIEMs (Splunk, QRadar)
- NDRs (Darktrace, ExtraHop)
- SOAR tools (Cortex XSOAR, IBM Resilient)
By sharing enriched metadata and alerts, you enable faster, more accurate investigations across your environment.
- Meet Compliance Needs – For telecom and government organizations, lawful intercept at 400G is non-negotiable. The best approach to cover your bases is to allow selective targeting of traffic, real-time session reconstruction, and secure delivery of content to authorized agencies—without disrupting performance.
At NetQuest, we’ve engineered our Streaming Network Sensors to thrive in these environments; delivering real-time metadata extraction and advanced filtering capabilities without disrupting performance or adding latency.
The Risk of Ignoring 400G Readiness
If your organization isn’t prepared for threat hunting at 400G, the consequences can be serious:
- Increased dwell time for attackers
- Inability to detect east-west movement
- Dropped packets and missed events
- Regulatory non-compliance
- Loss of confidence from customers and stakeholders
Failing to prepare cybersecurity infrastructure for 400G environments introduces serious consequences. Without the ability to capture and analyze data at these speeds, organizations risk extending attacker dwell time, giving adversaries more opportunity to entrench themselves within networks. Events may be dropped or missed entirely if tools are unable to process data quickly enough, resulting in critical gaps in incident response.
Threat actors are already using encryption, speed, and stealth to their advantage. If your threat hunting tools can’t see what’s happening at 400G, then your defenses are falling behind.
Final Thoughts
The migration to 400G is reshaping the network landscape—and the speed at which data moves is now outpacing many traditional cybersecurity strategies. Organizations can no longer afford to rely on legacy threat hunting techniques that were designed for slower, simpler networks.
By investing in scalable visibility solutions, focusing on metadata over raw packets, and integrating modern tools built for high-speed environments, cybersecurity teams can reclaim the upper hand. NetQuest Corporation stands at the forefront of this evolution with their Streaming Network Sensors. The SNS can extract metadata from 400G links with zero packet loss and no need for decryption.
400G is here—and your threat hunting strategy must be ready to meet it.