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Despite being one of the older security technologies, firewalls are still the most utilized network security control in the enterprise. As Gartner noted in its last Magic Quadrant, “firewalls have long provided the most cost-effective means of protecting vulnerable PCs, servers and infrastructure from external attacks to enable secure business use of the Internet.” One of the many operational challenges in managing firewalls is that business units are constantly requesting new access through the firewall. While most security teams are quick to accommodate a business unit’s request, very rarely do these same teams audit whether a requested access is still required 6 months, a year or even 2 years after the request is processed. Many of these requests are for a temporary access that ends up remaining in the firewall policy for years.

At FireMon, we have seen customer environments where as many as 70% of the rulebase was not being used. These unused rule can significantly degrade the performance of a firewall, and can potentially introduce risk into the environment by allowing protocols or networks access into your enterprise that are not needed. As the NIST guidelines for firewall policy state “generally, firewalls should block all inbound and outbound traffic that has not been expressly permitted by the firewall policy—traffic that is not needed by the organization.” Allowing unused rules to remain in a policy goes against this central tenant and represent an open risk to the organization.

Fortunately, FireMon Security Manager makes it easy to identify unused rules within your firewall policy. Within the list of devices in the Security Manager client, a user can simply right click on any firewall device, select reports and then Unused Rules Report. The pop-up box that appears allows you to specify a date range or previous number of days to show unused rules within that time frame. Users can also select if they would like the report output to be a PDF, Web Page or XML data. Clicking Finish will produce the report, which will show unused rules for both the Security and NAT rules on the device. Security Manager also enables users to setup the Unused Rules Report to run automatically on a daily, weekly,monthly, yearly or custom time frame. This automated report can also be emailed to any number of recipients. A common best practice among many Security Manager users is to have the Unused Rules Report emailed to them the 1st of each quarter showing which rules went unused for the last 90 days, reviewing the access with the business unit that requested the rule (which is identified by Security Manager using the Policy Planner tool) and removing the rule if the business unit has no valid justification for continuing to have the rule within the policy.

By leveraging this simple but powerful report within Security Manager, security managers can ensure that their firewalls are not introducing any unnecessary risk to the organization or negatively impacting the firewalls performance by unnecessarily increasing the size of the rulebase.

In our first post on accurately measuring & scoring risk, we examined the holistic network approach many enterprises take around managing risk. This approach is to run vulnerability scanners against parts of their network or the network in its entirety at some predetermined interval. In both cases, scans are run, vulnerabilities are identified and possibly prioritized based on asset value, patching activities are scheduled over the next month or quarter, and the event repeats itself. As we noted, this approach over-simplifies the complex task of risk, as different threats and different assets define different risks.

The answer to this dynamic risk challenge is clear. Organizations need to operationalize risk into their daily security activities, and not make risk management simply a set event that occurs at predetermined intervals. As changes occur to the organizations risk posture based off of the business activities noted in our last post, or larger corporate events such as M&A or moving to the cloud, security organizations need to be able to dynamically and easily analyze this change to their risk posture in real time. To effectively do so, a tool that provides the ability to create different risk scenarios is required. Scenarios enable an organization to address each different threat to their assets as changes occur.

In the previous post, we provided the example of a business unit requesting VPN access to a new business partner after the predetermined scan had already been run. Leveraging a tool that provides the ability to create different risk scenarios, the security team would be able to create a new scenario to identify the new connectivity from the business partner into their network. To truly be effective, the tool would not only need to be able to identify this new connection, but have the contextual awareness of the firewall policy, network topology and any other network security devices that might be traversed between the front and back end systems involved in this new connectivity to accurately identify any potential vulnerabilities that are introduced from this new partnership.

FireMon Risk Analyzer is just that tool. Risk Analyzer enables administrators to create different scenarios: VPN connectivity to new business partners, connectivity to a cloud provider, a new data center coming online. Combined with Risk Analyzer’s full network topology and security policy awareness (which can be continually updated in real time via FireMon Security Manager), end users are able to identify new risk scenarios, proactively identify the new risk introduced from the scenario, and virtually apply remediation to ensure that the most effective remediation is completed with the least amount of effort. Multiple scenarios can be created as different threats or business events are identified, and as changes occur to the configuration or connectivity within the scenarios, end users can easily and immediately re-run the scenario within Risk Analyzer to asses how these changes affect the true risk posture of the organization. Risk Scenarios enable organizations to achieve the goal of operationalizing risk into their everyday activity.

Today at the Juniper Networks Global Partner Conference, FireMon was honored to be invited to participate in the keynote address. FireMon’s President & CTO, Jody Brazil, joined Juniper’s CEO Kevin Johnson to demonstrate FireMon Risk Analyzer running on Junos Space. We at FireMon are thrilled to be partnering so closely with Juniper. The Space platform represents a significant development in terms of network programability and extensibility. FireMon Risk Analyzer leverages the rich real time configuration data provided by Junos Space to maintain the most accurate and update network topology within Risk Analyzer. FireMon also announced that while the current release of Risk Analyzer supports hooks into space, the release of Junos Space 12.1 would see the release of Risk Analyzer running natively within Junos Space. FireMon and Juniper will continue to work closely together to create the most accurate and real time risk analysis and remediation tool for Juniper environments, with many more exciting developments to come throughout the year.

The most recent post on our blog noted that understanding your organization’s exposure to risk is no small task. I have seen enterprises attempt to manage risk through feel or intuition, or simply reacting when executive leadership has read about the latest breach of the week and wants assurance that they aren’t at risk for the same calamity.  Fortunately, enterprises today are attempting to analyze and measure risk under a more formal process. Many attempt to do so by running vulnerability scanners against parts of their network or the network in its entirety at some predetermined interval. In both cases, scans are run, vulnerabilities are identified and possibly prioritized based on asset value, patching activities are scheduled over the next month or quarter, and the event repeats itself. Some organizations might even take the results of these efforts and assign a score, value or state to their risk posture.

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The holistic measurement of risk described above simplifies risk within today’s networks. Truly understanding your actual risk posture is much more complex. Different threats and different assets define different risks. Risk is also constantly changing, constantly in flux in the enterprise environments we work in today. With M&A activity, strategic partnerships being formed or abandoned, new data centers being brought up, data centers being consolidated or IT functions being moved into the cloud, risk is a never ending moving target in most enterprise environments. Considering the standard process where an organization runs a vulnerability scanner at set intervals and scores their risk posture based off the actions completed from this event, it’s easy to see how this score is not truly reflective of the true state of the organizations risk.

Consider the example where a security group may run an enterprise scan at the beginning of each month and then schedule remediation actions for the next three weeks. In the second week of the month, a business group requests a new VPN connection to a newly formed business partner. This access requires connectivity from the new partner network to a DMZ web server farm that is protected by a firewall cluster. The web farm is a front end to an internal financial database that is protected by another cluster of firewalls. The monthly process that the organization follows does not allow them to react to the new variable that has been created within their risk posture. Furthermore, even if the organization were to scan against this newly created connection, the scanner would simply be blocked by the firewall clusters. The scanner does not have awareness of the firewall configuration policy and the context of how data flows through the networking devices, firewall and any other subsequent network security controls related to the web server front end and the back end database servers. This speaks to the importance of factoring the full context of network security controls and data connectivity when analyzing risk, as we have previously covered in this blog.

Analyzing and scoring risk based solely off the enterprise wide scanning or patching efforts doesn’t provide an organization the most accurate measurement of what their true risk posture is. In the second part of our post, we will discuss a better approach to gain a more accurate and real-time awareness into what an organizations risk state truly is.

In our series on risk here at the Firemon blog, we have clearly stated that network security is all about risk. So if risk truly is the yardstick we should use to measure the state of our organizations security, why are so many of us not measuring risk correctly? There are many factors that contribute to this issue, but ultimately there tends to be one overriding issue that affects organizations perspective around security and risk.

Too many organizations view security and risk reduction as a project rather than an ongoing process. There are a number of security arenas where this myopic perspective of security as a project is displayed. Compliance initiatives around PCI DSS, HIPPA, GLBA, etc. tend to get slotted as a project to complete, and after said completion, security has been achieved. While compliance initiatives are an important and depending on the industry, required part of an organizations security efforts, they are not a project to complete that results in a state of security and therefore reduced risk. Time and time again, we have seen too many organizations assume that their PCI DSS compliance equals a secure network, only to be shocked when they are subsequently attacked.

Similarly, implementing a vulnerability analysis and remediation project has become most organizations default way to identify and reduce risk within their networks. Typically an organization will run an enterprise vulnerability scanner at set times, compile a list of the vulnerabilities identified, possibly prioritize actions based on asset value, and then schedule patch work for the next 2-3 months to fix the 100′s or 1000′s of vulnerabilities listed by the scanner. As we saw with compliance initiatives, too many organizations treat vulnerability scanning as simply another project to tick off the list, and once complete, assume they are secure. The vulnerability scanner also has no knowledge of the network security controls that are in place, and therefore is unable to truly identify exactly what is the most severe risk to the network security based off what is truly reachable or exploitable as we have previously highlighted on our blog. Vulnerability Scanners are a vital tool within any organizations remediation strategy, and one that hopefully most organizations are utilizing. They are not the end-all solution answer to risk by themselves though.

In both security arenas we discussed above, there is no real time, ongoing, effective measurement of the organizations true exposure to risk.  Project based approaches do not allow an organization to truly see how the efforts of the organization to reduce risk ultimately affect the overall risk posture. In both cases, they are gaining a false sense of security simply by completing projects related to security. To truly manage and reduce risk, organizations need to make the management of risk a daily part of their operational security. In order to operationalize risk, practitioners need to leverage a tool that fully measures all of the elements that affect the risk to the network, prioritize the actions that need to be taken, highlight the impact those actions will have on the security posture, and allow the organization to see how their risk posture has changed over time or as new changes have been required within their network connectivity. The key element to said tool must be a truly effective measurement of risk to enable risk management to become a daily operational function of security. In our next post, we will discuss what elements are required to fully and accurately measure risk to a network.

As those of you who have followed this blog over the past couple of months know, we have been slowly revealing bits and pieces about our new Risk Analyzer product here at Firemon. Over the next week and  in the coming months, you will see and hear a huge push around Risk from all areas of Firemon. The official release of Risk Analyzer is imminent, as our CEO noted in his twitter feed this morning. We have also highlighted our partnership with Juniper Networks around Risk Analyzer and JunOS Space. You can get even more insight into what we are doing together on Juniper’s YouTube channel.

Why are we suddenly so focused on Risk, and why is it something you should care about? At the end of the day, all of the security controls organizations have put in place, the firewalls, IDS/IPS’s, proxys, ACL’s, desktop firewalls, etc., are there to help reduce and eliminate the risk to your IT infrastructure. Risk is what we are trying to control and limit. However, as we have previously highlighted, analyzing risk in today’s networks is a huge challenge. We tend to rely on a single tool to determine risk, and in the complex network environments we live in today, these tools can present 1000′s of items that an organization needs to address. Attempting to manually review that list and prioritize the remediation results in organizations spending to little or too much time attempting to reduce their risk. Furthermore,  those tools lack the full contextual awareness of your entire network topology and how data flows through the environment, which is a real key to accurately identifying the areas of your infrastructure that are most at risk.

Risk Analyzer provides that full context of network topology awareness that is so critical to accurate risk analysis. It automatically shows you what actions to take to reduce the greatest amount of risk with the least amount of effort, ensuring your valuable resources are spending the exact amount of time needed to effectively reduce risk to your infrastructure. It’s patented analysis engine that has been proven for the past 4 years in the largest DOD and Intelligence networks produces results in seconds as opposed to hours or even days that other solutions require.  It graphically shows you where you are at risk from any part of your infrastructure. Risk Analyzer will help you automate the reduction of risk to your IT infrastructure.

This is why we are excited about Risk Analyzer and so focused on Risk. Risk, after all, is the key.

The amount of news generated around attacks in 2011 has been overwhelming. In just the last week, the reports around SCADA based attacks have reached almost histrionic levels. Attacks on NASA, AT&T & VCU have all been highlighted this month as well. Despite the fact that companies will spend over $8 billion dollars on network security this year, hackers continue to successfully breach networks with an alarming regularity.

In an article on APT’s  posted on Dark Reading  yesterday, Sean Brady from RSA had an interesting quote. He said “Identifying the entry point — where an attacker got into a company’s network — is a key aspect of identifying and responding to an advanced attack”. At Firemon, we couldn’t agree more. However, we would also ask why wait until you’ve been attacked to discover the entry point? Why not proactively find the entry point yourself? As clearly indicated by the attack coverage we’ve seen in the press this year, the attackers are actively looking to find the entry point into your network even as you read this post.

Firemon’s new Risk Analyzer technology is designed to proactively find the entry point into your network that can be exploited. Risk Analyzer will also identify where an attacker can pivot off that access point, and what other resources within your network can be compromised. Risk Analyzer will also prioritize what patched vulnerabilities can reduce the greatest amount of risk with the least amount of effort, helping to focus your organization’s remediation efforts. Don’t be the last to discover the entry points that are exposed in your network; he who finds the entry point first wins.

I read a quick blog post this morning from Rick Holland at Forrester. In fact, part of my title is borrowed from a line in his post. As security professionals, I think it is important to recognize that despite our best efforts, many of the network security controls that have been deployed have still failed to prevent breeches and attacks from occurring. Holland along with John Kindervag have published a new report called “Planning for Failure”. They note that this years headlines have not been encouraging for the security world, as evidenced yet again yesterday by the Steam website hack and the take down of Estonian hackers in Operation Ghost Click.

The deluge of news around breeches and incidents that have occurred this year should not cause us to throw our arms up and head for the exits. It should ultimately galvanize those of us in the security world to be more proactive about assessing the risk posture of our organizations, identifying the areas of weakness we have, and fixing them before an incident occurs. As Holland notes in his post “An ounce of preparation is worth a pound of remediation”. The full Planning for Failure report also stresses the importance of testing. We at Firemon could not agree more. Our new Risk Analyzer technology enables organizations to test their entire network topology, factoring in the network security controls that are in-place, and identify exactly where attackers could breach your network. Risk Analyzer will even highlight systems that are susceptible to client-side vulnerabilities that attackers could gain access to despite effective network security controls, and identifies where the attackers could further penetrate into the network by pivoting off these assets. Risk Analyzer’s patented analysis engine provides real-time analysis, and graphically shows you where in your topology you are vulnerable. Risk Analyzer also helps you to laser focus on what remediation steps will reduce the greatest amount of risk with the least amount of effort by providing a prioritized list of remediation actions, and allowing a user to virtually apply said patches, graphically showing the impact that remediation effort has on the networks risk posture.

We are excited to release Risk Analyzer this month, and believe it is the key part of a proactive testing process that all security organizations should implement as part of their overall Incident Management plan. Risk Analyzer will allow you to substantially reduce your risk posture, prioritize your remediation efforts, and to measure the effectiveness of the security controls you have put in place.

Lately, there has been a lot of discussion and interest on the blog around Firemon’s new Risk Analyzer product. While we are excited about bringing the fastest patented risk analysis and reduction engine to the market, we haven’t stopped developing new features in our flagship Security Manager product. The latest 5.3 release added support for both Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall appliances and Fortinet firewall appliances, including support for Fortnet’s Virtual Domain (VDOM) technology. Firemon continues to be a customer focused organization, and we are excited to add support for these great products as requested by our customers.

We are also very excited about the future direction of Security Manager. Stay tuned for more updates around the integration of Risk Analyzer into Security Manager, and the awesome functionality that will provide organizations in proactively knowing what risks they could introduce when adding or changing firewall or network access rules. In a recent survey conducted by Ernst & Young, only 49% of respondents stated that their information security function is meeting the needs of the organization. The combination of Security Manager and Risk Analyzer enable any security group to quickly and easily know the status of their security posture, and to validate that their information security investment is in fact meeting the needs of the organization.

I was able to attend this years JavaOne conference, and had the privilege of hearing the keynote from David Ward of Juniper Networks. If you missed his presentation, you can see it here. One of the key points in his presentation was that the network and applications need to work together. As Lauren Cooney points out in her blog, “The divide between IT and Developer is getting smaller and smaller – you can now access the network through a series of APIs and an orchestration layer that make it easier to build and scale applications specific to your network. The two need to work together to be successful.”

At Firemon, we believe the opening of the network API’s  is highly beneficial to those of us developing security applications for the enterprise network. We have ported our new Risk Analyzer product to run on Space, and leverage the Space SDK to provide the application real-time awareness of all the network devices and how data traverses the entire network topology. This enables Risk Analyzer to have the most complete, up to date and real-time picture of an enterprise’s network topology, enabling Risk Analyzer to create the most accurate graphical representation of your entire network. Risk Analyzer then combines the network information from Space with the results of enterprise vulnerability scanning and clearly highlights all of the paths attackers can take to penetrate your network, including client-side vulnerabilities, in a matter of seconds.

Space enables Risk Analyzer to factor in the full context of the network topology and network security controls to provide the most accurate risk analysis and remediation. Space enables Firemon to focus our development efforts on further enhancing Risk Analyzer’s patented analysis engines, knowing the Space SDK will always provide the necessary network information. Firemon is excited to be one of the first companies to partner with Juniper and leverage the Space SDK. We look forward to continued enhancement of the joint technology and many exciting developments to come in the next few months.