How can you improve firewall logging and auditing?

🔒 Enhancing network security is a top priority! Improving firewall logging and auditing can make a significant difference. 🚀 Here are some key tips: Enable comprehensive logging, capture detailed information, set up alerts, regularly review logs, and stay vigilant. 💡 Secure your digital fortress! #CyberSecurity #Firewall #DataProtection

Design the organization’s network architecture in away that allows for easier defense and proper augmentation. Additionally, look at your other controls that help increase your organization’s defense-in-depth, and take advantage of your SIEM to design correlation rules and detection alerts that give you optimized alerting and reporting on the state of your network.

I highly recommend enabling SSL decryption as it greatly improves visibility into encrypted streams. It enables better control over network traffic and overall better prevention and detection. However, user privacy to be reserved.

Enable Comprehensive Logging: Ensure that your firewall is configured to log all relevant network traffic, including both allowed and denied connections. This will provide a complete picture of what’s happening on your network. Centralized Logging: Implement a centralized logging system where all firewall logs are collected in one location. This makes it easier to monitor and analyze logs effectively. Log Encryption: Encrypt firewall logs to protect sensitive information. This helps maintain the confidentiality and integrity of the log data. Regular Log Review: Establish a routine for reviewing firewall logs. Regularly analyze logs to detect suspicious activity and potential security threats promptly.

Implementing blockchain technology in firewall logging and auditing will improve the process by bringing transparency, immutability, and security to the process. It's like having an unforgeable ledger of all your network's activities.

Just to add…. Modern firewalls and related intrusion detection/prevention systems have always been getting feature rich. In my experience many features have either been ignored or not configured. This is largely due to the user’s time/effort constraints or, “fear of the unknown button” or toggle switch on the firewall settings. Subsequently the erstwhile logs may lack the enriched threat intel which in turn impairs the modern day SIEM / SOAR’s effectiveness. Don’t let the seeming complex settings of the firewall limit the visibility of clear and present threats that could impact your business. Enhance log content and coverage.

I just wanted to add a quick thought here. It is easy to turn things on. But it is also easy to assume things are turned on. Especially when theres a merger or when theres a repurposing of devices like firewalls to a different part of the network. Always perform a cyber hygiene on everything when taking over existing devices according to your security policies. Nobody wants a case of a taken over firewall from a network not logging anything more than for example 11 days because everyone assumes that the firewall is logging since it passed its last audit check with the previous owner. This should apply to its fw rules as well.

All of the applications described here improve security processes and can be automated using a SIEM solution that creates correlations with network components. However, this type of correlation requires a powerful and reliable infrastructure for collecting log data. This solution must be able to filter and analyze logs and forward them to correlation engines. This log infrastructure must also have the necessary scalability and storage capacity to be able to process the large amounts of data that traffic-allowed logs represent. Such log collections can easily grow to several terabytes or even petabytes. The best way to get logs to talk is to start with log management, build a SIEM system on top of it and then develop it further.

📊 Logging is vital for insights and security, but choosing the right level matters. 📈 Opt for a balance that provides necessary data without overwhelming you. 🤝 Collaboration and planning are key to finding that sweet spot. 🚀 Make informed decisions with the right logging level! #CyberSecurity #Logging #DataInsights

When working on log retention it is important to consider industry regulations and customer commitments. These should dictate the length of the retention period.

The use of centralized logging and monitoring allows for real-time visibility of the environment. It has the advantage of providing comprehensive awareness of any potential suspicious activity within the east-west traffic (Lateral Movement). This capability is critical for detecting internal threats. Monitoring traffic between the North and South regions (referred to as Ingress/Egress Traffic) is critical in the areas of Intrusion Detection, Data Loss Prevention, and Performance Metrics. Benefits by implementing a centralized logging system: • Improve real-time and forensic analysis capabilities. • Get a complete picture of network activity. • Simplify compliance reporting. • Enhance the alerting and incident response processes.

You can enable firewall logging by monitoring the audit logs using a centralized logging system. A centralized logging system would structure and uniform the logs into a normalized format. Once the logs are indexed, key information can be parsed out and set a baseline for content since as reports, dashboards, and data models to be built off.

⚙️ Streamline your log management with a centralized system. 🔄 It simplifies analysis, improves security, and enhances compliance. 📊 Unlock the power of your data efficiently! 💡 #LogManagement #Efficiency #DataInsights

Centralizing log management is vital for analyzing not just firewall logs but all security logs that aid in incident investigations. Ensure data is normalized and adheres to a standard format like CIM before it is ingested. This promotes smooth information exchange, interoperability, and streamlined data analysis, enhancing log contextualization. To economize, think about setting up a security data lake as the foundation for your centralized log management system, and then layering a SIEM solution on top of it.

One must also consider the need to actually have a Log Formatting Standard (or similar) in place. Such overarching document will set the tone for specific requirements when handling log data, which will ease the burden of having to process and parse different log sources. This is particularly important for centralized logging, since without a coherent log structure, it can become frustratingly difficult for teams (e.g. SOC Analysts) to actually correlate different events. Having a centralized log management system can increase the overall security posture, since you can set specific hardening security controls on such systems, specifically for ensuring integrity and availability of such data (e.g. WORM - write once, read many data storage).

Streamline the logging by sending it to the centralized log solution (SIEM) and integrate it with a SOAR where you can automate with firewall logging event playbook to improve your response time and reduce manual firewall log review.

Traffic-allowed logs also provide valuable data when it comes to policy violations or the misuse or circumvention of internal control systems. They record protocols or services that should actually be blocked but have nevertheless passed through the firewall. These include instant messaging services or peer-to-peer file sharing applications. As a supplement to the firewall's filter policies, TALs can be used to detect misuse of production servers. For example, a TAL shows traffic from critical Windows controller servers if they do not use a Windows-related protocol such as AD (Active Directory), DNS (Domain Name System), Kerberos (standard protocol for authentication under Windows) or LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).

This is particularly important not only for the cost saving (i.e. popular SIEM tools do charge for ingested data), but also to reduce the workload of the field teams, such as SOC Analysts. Alert fatigue is a real thing.

I can attest to the importance of dashboards and reports for senior management based on my recent experience refining firewall reporting for a company. These tools provide real-time metrics that allow for immediate and informed action, as well as trend analyses that are critical for future security planning. I was able to significantly improve the organization's firewall posture by improving these dashboards. The IT team was able to clearly see the risks associated with outdated or vulnerable firewall systems as a result of this. As a result, we were able to identify and implement effective solutions collaboratively. Simply, dashboards and reports are strategic assets for smarter decision-making.

Ensure that your firewall is configured to log all relevant events and traffic, including allowed and denied traffic, security policy violations, and administrative actions. Implement automated log analysis tools or SIEM solutions to proactively detect security threats and anomalies in real-time. Configure alerting mechanisms to notify security personnel of critical events or anomalies immediately.

Reporting and dashboards are some of the best ways to communicate results with senior management. Nonetheless, having the right reporting out of the box is not something that is usually available. Depending on the target audience, there's the need to further process the results, and most of these KPIs are usually integrated in some sort of consolidated dashboard anyway.

In order to better assess network activities, trend analyses based on traffic-allowed logs provide a valid basis for decision-making: Who is talking to whom? Which protocol is being used? How many bytes are being sent and received? Reports of this type are usually available as top-N lists. The data can also be presented in graphic form, for example broken down by country. This can be done using a geo-IP database. The administrator can then see on a map, for example, which countries are responsible for traffic peaks, i.e. from which regions a server or website is being accessed particularly frequently.

The logs generated by firewalls provide valuable insights into traffic patterns and potential threats. The effectiveness of these logs depends on their policies and management settings, which need to be regularly updated and periodically reviewed to keep up with the changing landscape. It's crucial to identify gaps in log management plan and make changes. As network infrastructures change, firewall logging settings should reflect that delta to remain compliant with relevant standards and regulations. As firewall software is updated, it can include new logging features, or improvements. Reviewing logging settings, storage use can be optimised by managing the logs generated. Hence review and update of firewall logging settings is critical.

Reviewing and updating of logging and auditing policies should not be different that any other policies. Those are (or should) be integrated in your companies's standard document reviewing procedures, for which the industry standard points to at least yearly or after any significant change.

Segment your networks. Not only will it enhance the overall security posture of your network, it will make firewall management easier. Additionally, if you do get breached, being able to quickly block entire networks from reaching one another will drastically improve your containment and mitigation efforts.

Most next-gen firewalls have intrusion prevention and detection functions together. One of the mistakes I have seen is not turning on SSL decryption in-line. Without decryption turned on, you won’t be able to capture attacks such as SQL injection, XSS, etc attacks that are tunneled across encrypted HTTPS channels.

Enable compliance checking firewall as refer standarization iso27001, pci dss abd Regularly running redteam exercise for entire network segmentation to improve firewall robust

Determine how long you'll keep logs based on compliance requirements and storage capacity. Archive older logs in a secure manner, ensuring they're retrievable if needed.

To avoid potential performance issues at the next Gen firewall due to SSL inspection i would instead insert a tap inline tap or mirror the traffic and perform offline decryption of SSL traffic and pump to a SIEM. With a tap i can have full visibility of the Pcap after decryption or traffic or packet level.