Security compliance auditing is getting a lot of coverage these days thanks to standards such as SOX, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Even if a specific standard isn’t on your radar, business relationships with partners or customers may still require you to prove that your network is secure.
Beyond meeting mandates, security compliance audits for your firewalls are a security best practice and an important mechanism for understanding your current security posture.
A firewall audit can increase your chances of catching weaknesses and finding blind spots and dark zones where your policies need to adapt. They also help prove you have been doing your due diligence. Often, findings help correct policies and procedures that are incorrectly documented or omitted.
Using documentation to demonstrate that you review your network security controls regularly is critical to addressing lawsuits, data breaches, or regulatory issues that call your practices into question. Of course, preventing these issues is even better.
Let’s review five steps to help ensure your enterprise is conducting effective audits.
1.Identification: Know Your Network
Knowing what you have in your environment is the cornerstone of security hygiene and, ultimately, the success of your auditing process. Large, complex enterprises understandably struggle with managing complex, fast-changing environments – what you don’t know *can* hurt you. Dark zones and blind spots in your network only serve to give regulatory compliance auditors a reason to question your security posture.
The problem of unauthorized, rogue, and insecure connections between the enterprise and the Internet continues to plague IT and security managers alike. Disparate management tools for hybrid cloud and physical environments limit the visibility of shadow networks and cloud instances that may harbor unknown threats. These backdoors provide a method by which the transport of sensitive information can circumvent internal controls and escape the network.
How well do you know your network? Ask yourself the following questions:
- What is your presumed list of endpoints/ network devices?
- Can you demonstrate that your asset management is robust and up to date?
- How do you discover additional or new devices added to the network?
- Can you detect unauthorized forwarding devices (Layer2/Layer3)?
- Are there unknown or non-responding networks in your environment?
- Have you identified any paths that may leak data around your security controls?
- If you must supply credentials to your network devices, are these credentials documented? Are they rotated regularly?
- Have you identified and documented all zones that keep sensitive data per regulatory requirements?
- Do you have a complete document of the “network source of truth” and topology map?
FireMon security compliance audits provide visibility, vulnerability, and risk management that enables teams to find and secure unknown, rogue and shadow clouds, network infrastructure, and endpoints. This capability helps you discover more by:
- Eliminating 100% of your blind spots and monitoring changes or unusual behaviors to eliminate any gaps in coverage that may leave you exposed
- Discovering, mapping, and alerting on topology changes across the entire hybrid enterprise, including multi-cloud environments
- Monitoring the hybrid infrastructure for telltale signs of nefarious activity and prioritizing findings for investigation and remediation
- Finding inbound and outbound leak paths to the Internet, virtual private cloud
2. Assessment: Evaluate Your Change Process
A good change management process is essential to ensure proper execution and traceability of firewall changes as well as for sustainability over time to ensure continuous compliance. 83% of all unplanned network outages are caused by mistakes made during an approved change; 70% of these mistakes are firewall-related.
The goal of this step is to make sure that requested changes are adequately approved, implemented, and documented.
The basic questions you should be asking when you audit a firewall change are:
- Is the requester documented, and is s/he authorized to make firewall change requests?
- Is the business reason for the change documented?
- Are there proper reviewers and approval signatures (electronic or physical)?
- Were the approvals recorded before the change was implemented?
- Are the approvers all authorized to approve firewall changes (you will need to ask for a list of authorized individuals)?
- Are the requested changes well documented in the change ticket?
- Has there been an assessment of the potential risks associated with the new/modified rule?
- Is there documentation of the change window and install date for each change?
- Is there an expiration date for the change?
- Is there verification and documentation that changes were tested and implemented correctly?
- Are you monitoring firewall updates in real time to verify execution?
FireMon delivers a comprehensive blueprint for security process automation that accelerates and streamlines policy management and intelligently upgrades your approval workflows.
This solution improves your efficiency by:
- Integrating with your existing ticketing systems to enable new requests to filter directly into our change automation platform and customizing request forms to ensure all relevant change information is captured upfront
- Delivering a comprehensive set of security policy automation capabilities that drive smart security process automation to effectively address your unique use cases, infrastructure, or compliance requirements
- Providing insight into any requests that would create duplicate rules, as well as any rules that allow similar access to a new request, reducing the complexity of your hybrid network
- Performing a pre-change impact analysis that simulates a potential rule change and analyzes its impact on compliance and security
3. Mitigation: Review Your Policy Rule Base
The next logical step is usually a review of the firewall rule base or policies. The methodology for this step varies widely among auditors because it has traditionally been challenging and is heavily technology-dependent.
Issues to keep in mind when preparing to clean up your firewall rule base:
- How many rules does the policy have? How many did it have at the last audit? Last year?
- Are there any undocumented rules?
- Are there any redundant rules that should be removed?
- Are there any rules that are no longer used?
- Are there any services in the rules that are no longer used?
- Are there any groups or networks in the rules that are no longer used?
- Are there any firewall rules with ANY in three critical fields (source, destination, service/protocol) and a permissive action?
- Are there any overly permissive rules that allow more than 1000 IP addresses in the source or destination?
Keep an Eye on Risks Within Your Rule Base
- Are there any rules that violate your corporate security policy?
- Are there any rules that allow risky services inbound from the Internet? E.g., protocols that pass login credentials in the clear like telnet, ftp, pop, imap, http, netbios, etc.
- Are there any rules that allow risky services outbound to the Internet?
- Are there any rules that allow direct traffic from the Internet to the internal network (not the DMZ)?
- Are there any rules that allow traffic from the Internet to sensitive servers, networks, devices, or databases?
- Have you analyzed firewall rules and configurations against relevant regulatory and/or industry standards
FireMon helps you streamline your security assessments and firewall rules cleanup by:
- Eliminating duplicate or shadowed rules that adversely impact the performance of your devices and introduce unnecessary complexity to your network
- Performing real-time analysis and providing an extensive history of rule and object usage in a policy to help you easily identify unused rules to optimize your network devices for peak performance and reduce risk
- Showing unique traffic patterns that exist in a rule and report on what data is flowing across a broadly defined address range
- Automating event-driven reviews and verification, recertifying the rules, and decommissioning those that are not needed
4. Monitoring: Check for Vulnerabilities and Remediate Issues
Essential for security compliance audits, a comprehensive risk assessment will identify risky rules, paths, and connections. What is “risky” can be different for each organization depending on the network and the level of acceptable risk.
The best way to combat unwarranted access is to identify and analyze areas of vulnerability preemptively. However, the complex nature of security policies combined with the time-consuming burden of patching tens of thousands of vulnerabilities makes threats challenging to see and assess.
Protect key vulnerability points by:
- Checking the network for published vulnerabilities in software, hardware, and network devices
- Documenting and assigning an action plan for remediation of risks and compliance exceptions found in risk analysis
- Verifying that remediation efforts and any rule changes have been completed correctly
FireMon helps you better manage risks within your environment with tools that:
- Score all attack simulations for risk and impact and then re-scores once you’ve made improvements to determine the impact of your changes
- Trace possible paths that attackers might use to gain access to your critical assets
- Integrates with your vulnerability management solutions (Qualys, Rapid7, and Tenable) to measure risk and identify potential attack penetration in your network
- Detect when new access will uncover vulnerable systems, scopes proposed changes before implementation and streamlines the approval process for access requests that have little impact on your risk profile
5. Reporting: Achieve Continuous Compliance
Once firewall and security device auditing are complete and a secure configuration has been applied to all devices, proper steps must be put in place to ensure continuous compliance.
Do you have a process to ensure ongoing firewall audits? Here are some key best practices to keep in mind:
- Consider replacing error-prone manual tasks with automated analysis and reporting
- Ensure that all procedures are adequately documented, providing a complete audit trail of all firewall management activities
- Make sure that a robust firewall-change workflow is in place to sustain compliance over time
- Repeat audit checklist item, auditing the change process to ensure continuous compliance, i.e., compliance might be achieved now, but in a month, the organization may have drifted out of compliance
- Ensure that there is an alerting system in place for significant events or activities, such as changes in specific rules or the discovery of new, high-severity risks
FireMon Helps Your Enterprise Stay Compliant
FireMon’s comprehensive solutions support your enterprise’s compliance efforts by delivering tailored assessments and proactive rule analysis to address regulatory requirements and evolving security needs.
- Providing out-of-the-box and customizable assessments to help you ensure compliance with regulatory bodies or internal best practices. Our customization engine ensures the assessments and reports are tailor-made for your needs.
- Automatically identifying rules that require immediate analysis based on real-world events. Event-driven rules are analyzed on criteria including time-frame expiration, critical security control failure, periodic review, or ad-hoc query to determine the appropriate remediation.
Providing documentation of rule certification decisions and justification to aid in compliance audits. You can review detailed information regarding each discussed rule with the option to approve or reject current rule configurations.
Enhance Your Security Posture with Firewall Auditing Software from FireMon
Auditing firewall security with FireMon’s software empowers your enterprise to proactively identify vulnerabilities, ensure compliance, and strengthen your overall security posture.
Book a demo today and discover how FireMon can help streamline your security compliance audits.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Compliance Audit?
Compliance auditing is a thorough review process that assesses an organization’s adherence to regulatory standards, policies, and internal guidelines. It identifies gaps, ensures security controls are in place, and verifies that practices align with industry and legal requirements to mitigate risks and enhance accountability.
How Often Should My Enterprise Be Conducting a Security Audit for Compliance Purposes?
Enterprises should conduct a security audit for compliance purposes at least annually, though high-risk industries may benefit from more frequent audits, such as quarterly. Regular audits ensure the audit report reflects current compliance status, identifies emerging risks, and verifies ongoing adherence to regulatory standards.
Why Is it Important to Have a Process for Auditing Firewall Security?
Having a process for auditing firewall security is crucial to ensure that firewalls effectively block unauthorized access while allowing legitimate traffic. Regular audits help identify misconfigurations, outdated rules, and vulnerabilities, reducing security risks and enhancing compliance. This proactive approach strengthens network defenses and supports regulatory adherence.
How Can I Evaluate Which Firewall Audit Tool Is Right for my Enterprise?
To evaluate the right firewall audit tool for your enterprise, consider factors like scalability, ease of integration with existing infrastructure, reporting capabilities, and real-time monitoring. Look for tools that offer customizable audit reports, support compliance requirements, and provide insights into misconfigurations to improve security posture. Test functionality through trials or demos to ensure it meets your specific needs.
