external communications traffic

Network data flows — packets, sessions, or data streams — that cross or purport to cross an organization's perimeter boundary between its internal systems and external, untrusted networks such as the internet. The distinguishing characteristic is directionality plus trust-domain context: the traffic either originates inside and is destined for external systems, originates outside and enters internal systems, or claims one of those origins (as in address-spoofed packets). Authority documents such as NIST SP 800-171 use the concept when specifying that boundary controls must restrict such traffic to designated servers and block traffic that appears to be spoofing internal addresses. In practice the expression serves as the object of boundary-protection controls — filtering, monitoring, denying by default, and extrusion detection — including the detection and denial of outgoing communications traffic that poses a threat to external systems, an activity NIST SP 800-53 calls extrusion detection.

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