The First Firewall Analyzer: Log Analysis
Security and events logs are the rawest form of security data a firewall can provide:
However, they still need to be implemented into your enterprise’s security. This is done by analyzing its logs and transforming raw firewall data into actionable intel.
These logs provide critical details for:
- Data packets’ origins
- Data packets’ intended destinations
By examining these, analysts can trace the flow of data, identify potential threats, and determine whether the traffic is legitimate or suspicious. IP-based analysis is the basis of legacy block/allow policies: an IP address can be compared against a firewall’s internal block or allow list.
Building on this are other metrics included in log data, like port numbers. Unusual or unexpected port usage can signal malicious activity, as attackers often attempt to exploit vulnerabilities through less commonly used ports.
And there’s yet more detail to be extracted from firewall log information:
The presence of timestamps, for instance, allows security teams to construct a chronological timeline of events, while user identifiers enable security teams to take a more macroscopic approach and correlate network activity across specific individuals.
The Role of NGFW
While it would typically be up to an analyst to manually sort through each piece of information, Next-Gen Firewalls (NGFW) enhance log management and analysis with AI models that are able to ingest the large swathes of information included in logs.
This enables teams to analyze firewall logs in real time, identifying unusual traffic, suspicious activity, and emerging attack patterns that otherwise are likely to slip under the radar.
Alongside the individual firewall logs, AI-powered firewall analyzers are able to:
- Take advantage of their proximity to real-time network data
- Build a picture of the day-to-day connections that take place
This allows a NGFW to detect unusual connections – like a flood of inbound traffic from a specific IP – and temporarily block the abnormal traffic.
The More Advanced Firewall Analyzer: Policy Analysis
Over half of security breaches are due to problematic firewall settings. Part of this overrepresentation is a result of the sheer hours that firewall rule analysis takes. Manually assessing and implementing new firewall rules relies on an organization’s change management strategy, which itself is often complex and full of moving parts.
This change management demands a full understanding of a rule’s reason for change, including:
- The objectives
- Possible risk of any change
There’s often more than one staff member involved in assessing and implementing these rules, and the necessary paper trail demands a full audit of who, where, when, and why.
Even after a rule change has been identified as necessary, change management often demands further network modeling to ensure it won’t break any other areas of a network. As a direct result of this massive time investment, firewall administrators are overwhelmed by change requests and unoptimized rulesets.
The demand for firewall automation goes beyond simple log management:
Next Gen Firewalls incorporate automated policy reporting alongside automated policy creation. Collectively, this form of firewall analyzer helps actively reduce the backlog of management, bringing management back into the same timeframe as attacks.
How Firewall Analyzers Automate Policy Reporting and Creation
Firewall analyzer tools provide a more intelligent approach to the policies making up your firewall’s protection. Part of this is the way in which NGFWs provide automated reporting on policy outcomes.
For instance, they allow the admins to see which firewall rules, policies, and access control lists (ACLs) are most frequently applied to each network. By providing admins this view of traffic patterns, it’s possible to establish precisely which rules have the highest impact across all environments.
Intelligent policy reporting also allows for current firewall rules to be sorted in the opposite way: by least-triggered.
Sorting By Least-Triggered
These can illuminate the active policies that are continuously making no difference – massively important to reducing firewall latency.
This is all supported by automated reporting, which helps admins keep a near-real-time eye on the most important rules within a firewall. These reports can automatically highlight conflicting or latency-heavy rules, and lend far better visibility into the impact each rule has on bandwidth and end-user latency.
These reports simplify firewall management, as administrators are granted the tools to rapidly identify potential opportunities for improvement.
Why A Consolidated Firewall Solution is Now Necessary
Modern security teams must monitor numerous data feeds and alerts – across threat intelligence, security incidents, anomaly detection and, of course, firewalls. The demands this makes on staff makes it considerably harder to recruit and retain the team you need.
Even worse, when dealing with a mixed bag of tools, your team’s skill sets are spread much thinner.
In contrast to the fragmented point solutions available in today’s market, Check Point takes a comprehensive approach to security architecture. Each element in this system leverages real-time threat intelligence to offer a unified view of the security threat landscape, enabling rapid detection and mitigation of cyberattacks.
Check Point’s approach positions firewall gateways as part of a broader security narrative.
This builds upon centralized policy management with:
- Application-based controls
- User behavior awareness
- Deep packet inspection
Find out more in our buyer’s guide here. Or, to see how our automation extends throughout the configuration management pipeline, get in touch for a demo.
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