Typically, organizations consider firewall safety as a one-and-done sort of answer. They set up firewalls, then assume that they’re “good to go” with out investigating whether or not or not these options are literally defending their programs in one of the best ways potential. “Set it and overlook it!”
As an alternative of simply counting on firewalls and assuming that they are going to at all times defend their companies from cyber danger, executives want to start out asking deeper questions on them. As with most areas of enterprise, it is essential to take a essential have a look at every answer that your group depends on for safety. So, let’s break down just a few questions that you just and your crew must be asking about firewall safety to get a extra correct view into your community protection posture.
1 — What does your crew’s firewall information seem like?
To be able to correctly service and maintenance firewalls, your crew must have a minimum of a baseline information of how firewalls function. It is particularly essential to grasp what a firewall can and might’t do. As an example, next-generation firewall options are constructed to carry out deep packet inspection, that means they give the impression of being into particular person items of knowledge that enter and exit your system – a “gatekeeper” in your programs, per se. They carry out this operate nicely, however solely once they can really see the information within the payload. That is changing into increasingly troublesome within the age of “encrypt-everything”.
2 — Does your safety crew spend time understanding the “different aspect”?
Who’s on the opposite aspect of malicious assaults? To be able to perceive tips on how to safeguard your community from hurt, your crew wants to grasp what – and who – they’re defending towards. The panorama of cyber-attacks has drastically modified over the previous few years, and malicious actors have accelerated in talent. With the development in applied sciences comes extra environment friendly and harmful cyber-criminals.
Hackers within the 2020s have extra highly effective instruments than ever earlier than, actually at their fingertips. They’re clever individuals, pushed by instruments that price them little to nothing to acquire. For example, credential stuffing assaults (taking a username and password from one web site, and attempting it out on different websites to entry further credentials) will be executed simply with a free, open-source instrument referred to as OpenBullet.
Safety groups have to take all of this into consideration, as they think about their present firewall options. In addition they want to think about the truth that most next-generation firewall options pre-date many of those highly effective hacking instruments by 10-20 years, and have modified little over the previous twenty years.
3 — Can your next-generation firewall answer actually encrypt and de-encrypt your entire knowledge?
Not like 20 years in the past, when firewalls have been first launched, nearly all knowledge packets that journey out and in of programs are encrypted. Which means that to ensure that deep packet inspection to work, your firewall wants to have the ability to de-encrypt the information, look by way of the contents for any indications of malicious exercise, after which, in lots of conditions, re-encrypt them to stick to modern-day compliance requirements.
This will take an infinite quantity of processing energy and time, so your firewall answer not solely must have the aptitude to encrypt and de-encrypt, however your system must have the bandwidth to help these actions. Worse, trendy encryption methods pushed by the worldwide demand for privateness, are making it increasingly troublesome to decrypt and re-encrypt knowledge within the first place.
4 — What number of IP addresses can your firewall answer block?
As we have explored above, deep packet inspection in a world of encrypted knowledge generally is a time-consuming course of, which may then change into a roadblock for right this moment’s fast-paced community environments. And due to this, your firewall expertise ought to have a technique to complement deep packet inspections, in case de-encryption cannot occur in time and packets containing malicious payloads slip by way of the cracks.
The easiest way to make sure that nothing will get previous your firewall unnoticed? By implementing IP tackle filtering as nicely. Since all site visitors is recognized by a singular IP tackle, it is a easy technique to catch any packets coming from (or going to) recognized malicious places and block them, with out even needing to test their contents.
However there’s an unlucky actuality about IP tackle filtering: most well-known firewall safety distributors cite that their options can solely acknowledge and block round 100,000-1 million IP addresses, on the very most. There are thousands and thousands (or billions) of recognized unhealthy IP circulating on the planet proper now. That is loopy, proper?! We thought so too, and created ThreatBlockr as an answer that solely targeted on IP tackle blocking to fill this evident hole. Our answer can help as much as 150 million IPs and Domains – about 1,000 instances greater than firewalls can help. It’s because we designed ThreatBlockr particularly for this use case. Firewalls weren’t constructed for this use case – they have been constructed for deep packet inspection, which is a really totally different engineering downside.
5 — Is your crew supplementing your firewall answer with different safety practices?
As highly effective as firewall options will be, they’re solely as sturdy because the people at your group. Irrespective of how vigilant and superior your safety crew’s initiatives are, if a single worker clicks on a phishing e-mail hyperlink, these efforts might all be for nothing.
It is essential to think about cybersecurity consciousness coaching, proper alongside safety options resembling firewalls. When your workers can keep away from phishing schemes and create (and rotate) safe passwords, they are going to contribute positively to your general safety program, making your bought options all of the simpler. When your IT crew is rigorous in regards to the well timed set up of the most recent software program safety patches throughout your total enterprise software program ecosystem, your safety posture will enhance immensely.
The underside line: firewalls aren’t a magical, black field answer that may repair all safety flaws. Firewalls are clearly not a silver bullet. In the event that they have been, nobody could be getting hacked. But, right here we’re, in 2022, with new breaches and threats recognized on daily basis. Firewalls have their place in a safety crew’s toolkit however must be complemented with gap-filling options, methodologies, and company-wide finest practices. Solely then can efficient cyber safety really be realized.
For organizations trying to perceive what threats are getting by way of their present safety stacks, ThreatBlockr provides a free menace danger evaluation to get a complete community safety audit.
