What can be addressed when using retrospective security techniques?

Whether an affected host needs a software update is a remediation decision, not an insight derived from replaying historical traffic data.

Retrospective security works by replaying or re-examining captured network flows, logs, and events from the past to understand what occurred during an incident. A primary outcome of this analysis is determining the scope of compromise - specifically which systems were affected by a given threat or malware campaign. This is possible because the historical data provides a complete record of lateral movement and communications.

Determining if a system needs physical replacement is a hardware lifecycle decision that falls outside the scope of retrospective traffic analysis.

Retrospective analysis looks at past recorded events and cannot determine the current, real-time presence of malware still active in the network.