A firewall audit is a process that examines your firewall's existing connections and access, as well as identifying vulnerabilities and reporting on firewall changes. Firewall audits assist you in identifying vulnerabilities in your network security posture and areas where your security policies must be customized. They assure stakeholders that you have kept your organization up to date by reviewing policy controls and security controls on a regular basis, and they put you in a position to respond to a breach or security issue.
Installing a firewall is critical for removing malicious traffic from your company's network. Firewalls detect malicious payloads using signature patterns and unauthorized traffic using rule patterns. A firewall audit is required because you must update your systems, fix bugs, and audit your security measures.
Follow these steps to conduct a firewall audit.
- Collect key information: A successful audit requires comprehensive visibility into your network's hardware, software, policies, and risks. Documents and reports from previous audits that include firewall objects, rules, and policy revisions are required. It will be simpler to review and track procedures and policies.
- Assess the change management process: A stable change management process allows for proper execution and tracing of firewall changes. Inadequate change documentation and untrustworthy validation of how the changes affect the network cause a slew of problems. By reviewing the procedures for rule-base change management, you can assess them.
- Audit the OS and physical security: Check that you can neutralize common cyber threats from both the physical and software security of your firewall. Maintain a list of authorized personnel who have access to the firewall server rooms and ensure that vendor patches and updates are implemented.
- Declutter and improve the rule base: Clean up your firewall and optimize the rule base to boost your firewall performance and IT productivity. Determine permissive rules by comparing policy usage to firewall logs. Unused connections, including irrelevant routes, can be removed. Examine VPN parameters to identify expired groups, disconnected groups, expired users, disconnected users, and unused users.
- Perform a risk assessment and fix issues: A thorough risk assessment is used to identify risky rules and ensure that they adhere to internal policies as well as relevant regulations and standards. Identify risky rules and prioritize them based on severity using industry standards and best practices. This is something that every organization is subject to, based on their network and acceptable risk criteria.
- Conduct ongoing audits: Once you've completed your first firewall audit, make sure you stay in compliance. Create an alerting process that notifies you of critical activities and events, such as when a policy's high severity risk is identified or when certain rules are changed. Replace error-prone manual tasks with automated analysis and reporting.
Do you need help with your firewall audit? Datagram is a leading Fortinet distributor in Dubai offering a wide range of IT expertise focused on network security, application delivery, and IT infrastructure. Our goal is to provide industry-leading IT solutions to help your organization improve network performance, mitigate risk and operate efficiently. If you are looking for Fortinet Firewall in Dubai, contact us.
