Today, every organization operates in a challenging business landscape where success is not guaranteed by the quality of its products or services. It is equally important for the company to comply with all applicable laws, regulations, and standards, including the regulations related to IT security and data privacy.

However, maintaining compliance is not easy because many regulations are extremely strict and are constantly changing. One example of such a regulation is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

Even organizations with a robust IT security ecosystem struggle to achieve compliance, more so if they have implemented multiple firewalls, each with its own ruleset and policy base. They must regularly audit these rulesets to ensure that every firewall is working as expected to strengthen the organization’s security posture. A detailed and regular firewall audit enables businesses to monitor firewall configurations and rule changes, validate access controls, and ultimately, ensure that firewalls comply with internal and external security standards.

That said, when organizations manage thousands of firewall rules, they often struggle to conduct audits using manual processes. Fortunately, implementing a firewall audit and compliance tool can simplify the audit effort. It can also ease compliance with internal security policies and external regulatory standards such as PCI-DSS. Let’s explore.

All organizations face firewall management issues, especially when there are many firewalls and associated rules to manage. An automated firewall audit tool simplifies the effort to analyze firewall configurations and identify compliance gaps.

The tool automatically analyzes firewalls and their rulesets, replacing the need for manual processes and human intervention. It audits every rule and configuration that controls network traffic, including access control lists (ACLs), interfaces, and address translations.

In addition, it continuously monitors firewall rule changes, and automatically runs audits on a pre-defined schedule. Finally, it flags the status of each compliance requirement and generates real-time reports about policy misconfigurations and compliance violations. By acting on these insights, your organization can update its firewall rules, which can then help improve network performance, reduce downtime, and improve overall security.

A manual firewall audit is often time-consuming and error-prone. Moreover, manual processes may not help you maintain continuous compliance – which most regulatory regimes require – if you have thousands of rulesets across many firewalls and routers, or if these rules change often.

A firewall compliance tool simplifies firewall audits and compliance-related tasks. It continuously monitors all firewalls, and their rules and rule changes. Using sophisticated algorithms, the tool evaluates all firewall rules against internal corporate policies and external regulations such as PCI-DSS. It then identifies compliance vulnerabilities and generates audit reports so you can see where these gaps exist and initiate appropriate remediation measures.

An advanced, feature-rich audit tool like AlgoSec checks all firewall policy changes for compliance violations before they are implemented so you can avoid the costs and efforts of after-the-fact remediations. Moreover, the entire change approval process is automatically documented, thus facilitating continuous, uninterrupted compliance across all firewalls throughout the organization.

All in all, a firewall auditing solution incorporates automation, continuous monitoring, event correlation rules, and real-time reporting that will save you countless man-hours and funds that you normally spend on configuration cleanup and firewall optimization. Additionally, it will enable your organization to:

• Keep track of all firewalls and firewall activity logs in a central location
• Discover outdated, unused, or misconfigured rules that weaken network security, lead to downtime, or affect business continuity
• Identify where changes are needed to optimize performance and security
• Track and analyze suspicious or potentially malicious network events
• Automatically document all configuration changes to avoid security blind spots
• Demonstrate compliance to internal and external auditors

The best tools support multiple firewall platforms and are well-suited for consolidating firewalls and streamlining their configurations.

A detailed and regular firewall audit is critical for managing firewall rules and maintaining the right firewall configurations. A single misconfigured or outdated rule can leave the entire network – and the organization – vulnerable to a cyberattack. A typical manual audit includes all these steps:

• Collect information about the network and its various elements, including hardware network devices, software applications, VPNs, and ISPs
• Collect firewall logs
• Collect information related to operating systems, default configurations, and latest patches
• Assess the existing rule-base change-management process to confirm whether changes and validations are done reliably, transparently, and with proper documentation
• Audit every firewall’s physical and software security posture by evaluating:
  • Device administration, security management, and configuration management procedures
  • Whether operating systems are sufficiently hardened
  • Whether firewall activities are recorded and logged
  • Whether an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is in place
  • Whether patches and updates are implemented by firewall vendors
  • Whether access controls are in place for firewall and management servers
  • Who is allowed to access the firewall server rooms and make device configuration changes
• Remove unused and expired rules to optimize the rule-base
• Evaluate policy usage against firewall logs to identify (overly) permissive rules
• Analyze VPN parameters to identify and remove unused connections, irrelevant routes, and expired/unused users/user groups
• Perform a detailed risk assessment to discover risky and non-compliant rules based on internal policies and industry standards and best practices (e.g., PCI-DSS)
• Prioritize rules in terms of severity and the organization’s criteria for “acceptable” risk
• Implement appropriate remediations
• Review firewall backup, encryption, and restore-processes for recovery from disasters, and maintain business continuity

All these steps – not to mention a robust risk management process – are essential to ensure reliable and insightful firewall audits. But the effort can quickly become overwhelming if there are a large number of firewalls and each firewall has a vast rule-base. Here’s where automated compliance audits with a tool like AlgoSec are very valuable.

For a more detailed checklist that will help you simplify firewall auditing, and reduce cybersecurity risks in your IT environment, click here.

AlgoSec’s security policy management solution simplifies and streamlines firewall security audits. All you need to do is follow four easy steps:

• Ensure that your network is fully integrated with the AlgoSec platform
• In AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer, click “Devices” and then “All Firewalls”
• Click “All Reports” and then the listed report
• Click “Regulatory Compliance”

This simple process is all you need to conduct an effective and comprehensive firewall audit and to maintain compliance with PCI-DSS and other regulations.

Make your firewalls audit-ready and compliant using AlgoSec

AlgoSec’s solution does all the heavy lifting with regard to the auditing of firewall rulesets and configurations. It is designed to ensure that your configurations satisfy the criteria for both external regulatory standards such as PCI-DSS and internal security policies.

AlgoSec’s solution also helps you reduce overall risk factors and improve firewall performance by:

• Instantly generating audit-ready reports for all major regulations, including PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX, and NERC
• Generating detailed and customizable reports for internal compliance requirements
• Proactively checking every rule change for compliance violations
• Flagging non-compliant rules and devices
• Providing a detailed audit trail of all firewall changes, approval processes, and violations

All in all, AlgoSec gives you all the information you need to remediate problems in your firewall devices and rules and to ensure continuous compliance across the network.

Maintaining continuous PCI-DSS compliance with AlgoSec

PCI-DSS compliance is mandatory for any business that processes customers’ credit cards. Its guidelines are intended to enhance the security of card data, and protect cardholders from security events such as data breaches and identity theft.

The standard specifies 12 requirements that organizations must meet. One of these requirements is to install and maintain a firewall to prevent unauthorized system access and protect cardholder data. Businesses must also implement controls to properly configure firewalls, and create configurations that restrict connections between the cardholder data environment and untrusted networks. In addition, they must document all security policies and operational procedures for managing firewalls.

Firewall audits can help organizations maintain the correct firewall rules, strengthen network security, and meet PCI-DSS requirements. AlgoSec’s solution simplifies the effort with automation, continuous monitoring, and out-of-the-box templates. It also provides change audit trails and audit-ready compliance reports to satisfy both external regulatory requirements and internal regulations. Furthermore, it provides custom analyses, reports, and notifications that help you to periodically review all firewall configurations, identify security issues and compliance gaps, and take action to maintain compliance with PCI-DSS.

Other industry standards supported by AlgoSec

PCI-DSS is not the only set of standards supported by  solution. In fact, it supports a wide range of many leading industry standards and regulations, including:

• HIPAA
• SOX
• ISO 27001
• NERC
• Basel II
• FISMA
• GLVA
• NIST 800-41
• GDPR

The solution automatically generates pre-populated, audit-ready compliance reports for all these regulations and customized reports for your internal corporate policies to help you maintain compliance with all relevant laws and standards. Additionally, it helps you to reduce firewall audit preparation efforts and costs by as much as 80%— making life much easier for you as well as your auditors.

Most modern-day organizations are grappling with an ever-expanding cyber threat landscape. Clever attackers armed with sophisticated tools make businesses vulnerable to many kinds of undesirable events, such as data breaches and malware attacks. External laws and regulations as well as internal security controls are meant to prevent such events and enable firms to protect their IT assets and sensitive data.

One of the most important controls is the network firewall, which is often the first line of defense between the enterprise network and the public Internet. Since the firewall is so important for strengthening enterprise security and for maintaining a strong regulatory compliance posture, all its configurations and rules must be properly set up and optimized. Here is where regular firewall audits play an important role.

In the previous section, we covered a step-by-step firewall audit checklist. This section covers some best practices for configuring your firewall rules, and a checklist for reviewing and optimizing them. Optimizing your rule-base will enable you to improve firewall performance, reduce security risk, and maintain compliance with PCI-DSS and other standards.

Checklist for conducting firewall rule-base reviews

It is useful to follow this checklist to review and optimize your firewall rule-base and improve firewall performance:

• Does the tool understand the network topology, VLAN architecture, and IP address scheme?
• Is there a cleanup rule to block malicious traffic that doesn’t follow any rule?
• Do you have rules for firewall management?
• Are logs enabled for each rule?
• Are limited ports defined for access to management?
• Are large subnets blocked from accessing the firewall? If a particular subnet is given access, is there an appropriate business rationale behind the decision?
• Are there duplicate objects, services, or host networks in the rule-base?
• Are the best or business-critical services correctly positioned within the rule-base? And are out-of-use services removed from the rule-base?
• Are there outdated, legacy, excess, shadow, or expired rules in the rule-base?
• Do any rules allow risky services, which are outbound to or inbound from the Internet?
• Are any rules overly permissive?
• Are the rules consistently named? Do they contain recognizable headers and comments to make them easier to understand?
• Is two-way access configured in the network infrastructure? Is it used for legitimate reasons?
• Are rules configured to ensure that vulnerable ports and services are not allowed?
• Are there similar rules that could be combined into a single rule?

In addition to using this checklist, make sure that all firewall rules align with the organization’s policy matrix and corporate network security policy. The matrix specifies whether traffic should be allowed or blocked from every zone and VLAN in the network.

An automated firewall rule audit tool or solution can find the answers to all these questions and ensure alignment with the policy matrix and security policy. With its built-in audit capabilities, it quickly completes rule-base reviews and generates detailed reports that will help you conduct (and pass) firewall audits.

Best practices to configure firewall rules

The right rules are crucial to maintaining firewall performance and network security. A below-par rule-base can create serious security loopholes that allow malicious traffic to sneak in and operational loopholes that block legitimate traffic. The best way to avoid these problems is to properly frame and configure robust firewall rules. To do so, it’s important to adhere to these best practices:

• Clearly document the purpose of each firewall rule and which services, users, and devices it affects
• Add an expiration date to temporary rules
• Group similar rules by categories or section titles to make rules easier to understand and to determine their best order
• Create a formal change process to govern and control all policy changes
• Monitor the change process to prevent poor firewall configurations and associated security risks
• As much as possible, implement least privileged security policies, which will help minimize the attack surface
• Use an automated management and monitoring tool to standardize firewall policies and rules in a scalable manner
• List and categorize all source IPs, destination IPs, and destination ports to simplify firewall rule creation
• Include as many parameters in the rules as possible
• Use address and service sets to simplify rule management and adjustments
• Use drop rules to capture unclassified traffic and ensure it doesn’t infiltrate a security policy
• Offer access only to known services and to specific traffic

By following these best practices, you will get more control over your firewalls and protect the network from suspicious and malicious traffic. Make sure to also review all firewall rules regularly with the help of a regular maintenance schedule as well as firewall auditing and management tools. It is also good practice to regularly review firewall logs for any changes or indications that firewall settings, or rules, need to be adjusted.

AlgoSec’s Firewall Analyzer (AFA) provides complete visibility into enterprise networks and firewall rulesets. Use AFA to see where traffic is blocked in your network and accordingly configure policies from a single, unified interface.

If you have multiple firewalls, you probably have a hard time configuring the rules for each. And if you want to allow or deny something, you probably have to log into each firewall and make the requisite changes. All this hassle is eliminated with AFA’s automated security policy management capabilities.

With this intuitive yet powerful security policy management solution , you can automatically create, update, clean up, and optimize all policies from a single administration panel and workflow. AFA will reduce your firewall and security audit preparation time and costs with audit-ready reports. It will also assist you with PCI-DSS compliance and firewall security optimization.

Click here for a free demo of AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer.