Avoid cyber exposure: reduce risk with firewall rules best practices

Firewalls are critical security controls. To reduce cyber security complexity, Skybox Security provides a single pain of glass for firewall management. With our network model, you can understand your firewall traffic patterns to validate the state of your security.

Fifty-five percent of IT security decision-makers surveyed by Akamai and Ponemon Institute expressed concerns about the agility of their organisations’ security posture, citing that firewall rule changes took longer than three weeks to implement. A root cause is firewall rule bloat and complexity. Removing unnecessary and outdated rules and objects reduces firewall policy complexity, increases manageability and reduces misconfigurations, service disruptions and rollbacks.

A simpler ruleset facilitates easier documentation of business justification and ownership for each rule. A clear, intelligible ruleset combined with effective rule life cycle management processes enable organisations to comply with internal policies and external regulatory frameworks continuously.

1. Identify shadowed, redundant, expired or disabled rules;
2. Identify duplicate or orphaned objects;
3. Identify unused rules/objects;
4. Identify partially used rules/objects, evaluate flows;
5. Create tickets for rule/object deletion/modification; and
6. Automate provisioning of rule/object changes on firewalls.

Read our solution brief to get the in-depth low-down on the six steps to firewall hygiene with optimised rulesets:

Skybox Firewall Assurance and Skybox Change Manager enable your security team to take on and easily solve firewall management issues. Firewalls are continuously optimised, rule recertification is automated and compliance is ensured. The result reduces your cyber exposure risk exponentially by delivering a concise, manageable, optimised ruleset and automated change management workflows for provisioning firewall rule and object changes.

Rule optimisation and smart automation are firewall rules best practices, especially in industries such as financial services, where periodic rule recertification is mandatory. The ability to de-risk proposed changes against unintentional vulnerability exposure is a Skybox differentiator and a critical capability for organisations interested in maintaining a fortified security posture against popular threats such as zero-day DDOS attacks. Skybox rule optimisation capabilities extend to cloud firewall solutions and can be used to de-risk firewall deployments.

Key features in Skybox Firewall Assurance include firewall vulnerability detection and risk mitigation, rule-based optimisation, firewall rule usage optimisation, firewall access, rule configuration and compliance. Skybox Change Manager fully automates change management workflows to improve communication and efficiency across security teams, validates proposed firewall changes by checking for access and rule policy violations as well as new vulnerabilities, and uses formalised tickets and closed-loop workflows to ensure changes match the original intent.

• Protect your attack surface by eliminating risky firewall access rules;
• Enhance business agility through firewall rule automation and provisioning;
• Optimise firewall rule planning and strengthen your network security policy;
• Free up personal time through automated firewall rule analysis;
• Accelerate firewall audit readiness and stay continuously compliant;
• Reduce exposure to new vulnerabilities by leveraging Skybox threat intelligence; and
• Enforce continuous policy compliance with clear and intelligible rule sets.

The benefits of the combined Skybox solutions’ capabilities reduce the overall complexity of your cyber risk management plan as well as your cyber exposure.

Skybox Security is a Display sponsor of the annual ITWeb Security Summit 2023 to be held at Sandton Convention Centre in Sandton, Johannesburg on 6 and 7 June 2023 and at Century City Conference Centre, Cape Town on 15 June 2023. In an increasingly connected, digital world, cyber security threats are constantly evolving and increasing in number and sophistication. Security professionals need to be up to speed with the latest technologies, techniques and skills for predicting and mitigating potentially crippling cyber attacks, the methods and tools in use by today's threat actors and the latest legal and compliance demands. ITWeb Security Summit 2023, now in its 18th year, will again bring together leading international and local industry experts, analysts and end-users to unpack the latest threats facing African CISOs, CIOs, security specialists and risk officers, demystify emerging cyber security strategies in AI, blockchain, IOT, DevSecOps and more, and explain how to increase an organisation's cyber resiliency. Register today.