Often, organizations think of firewall security as a one-and-done type of solution. They install firewalls, then assume that they are "good to go" without investigating whether or not these solutions are actually protecting their systems in the best way possible. "Set it and forget it!"

Instead of just relying on firewalls and assuming that they will always protect their businesses from cyber risk, executives need to start asking deeper questions about them. As with most areas of business, it's important to take a critical look at each solution that your organization relies on for security. So, let's break down a few questions that you and your team should be asking about firewall security to get a more accurate view into your network defense posture.

1 — What does your team's firewall knowledge look like?

In order to properly service and upkeep firewalls, your team needs to have at least a baseline knowledge of how firewalls operate. It's especially important to understand what a firewall can and can't do. For instance, next-generation firewall solutions are built to perform deep packet inspection, meaning they look into individual pieces of information that enter and exit your system – a "gatekeeper" for your systems, per se. They perform this function well, but only when they can actually see the data in the payload. This is becoming more and more difficult in the age of "encrypt-everything".

2 — Does your security team spend time understanding the "other side"?

Who is on the other side of malicious attacks? In order to understand how to safeguard your network from harm, your team needs to understand what - and who - they're defending against. The landscape of cyber-attacks has drastically changed over the past few years, and malicious actors have accelerated in skill. With the advancement in technologies comes more efficient and dangerous cyber-criminals.

Hackers in the 2020s have more powerful tools than ever before, literally at their fingertips. They're intelligent people, driven by tools that cost them little to nothing to obtain. As an example, credential stuffing attacks (taking a username and password from one site, and trying it out on other sites to access additional credentials) can be executed easily with a free, open-source tool called OpenBullet.

Security teams need to take all of this into account, as they consider their existing firewall solutions. They also need to consider the fact that most next-generation firewall solutions pre-date many of these powerful hacking tools by 10-20 years, and have changed little over the past two decades.

3 — Can your next-generation firewall solution really encrypt and de-encrypt all of your data?

Unlike 20 years ago, when firewalls were first introduced, almost all data packets that travel in and out of systems are encrypted. This means that in order for deep packet inspection to work, your firewall needs to be able to de-encrypt the data, look through the contents for any indications of malicious activity, and then, in many situations, re-encrypt them to adhere to modern-day compliance standards.

This can take an enormous amount of processing power and time, so your firewall solution not only needs to have the capability to encrypt and de-encrypt, but your system needs to have the bandwidth to support these activities. Worse, modern encryption techniques driven by the global demand for privacy, are making it more and more difficult to decrypt and re-encrypt data in the first place.

4 — How many IP addresses can your firewall solution block?

As we've explored above, deep packet inspection in a world of encrypted data can be a time-consuming process, which can then become a roadblock for today's fast-paced network environments. And because of this, your firewall technology should have a way to complement deep packet inspections, in case de-encryption can't happen in time and packets containing malicious payloads slip through the cracks.

The best way to ensure that nothing gets past your firewall unnoticed? By implementing IP address filtering as well. Since all traffic is identified by a unique IP address, it's a simple way to catch any packets coming from (or going to) known malicious locations and block them, without even needing to check their contents.

But there's an unfortunate reality about IP address filtering: most well-known firewall security vendors cite that their solutions can only recognize and block around 100,000-1 million IP addresses, at the very most. There are millions (or billions) of known bad IP circulating in the world right now. That's crazy, right?! We thought so too, and created ThreatBlockr as a solution that solely focused on IP address blocking to fill this evident gap. Our solution can support up to 150 million IPs and Domains - about 1,000 times more than firewalls can support. This is because we designed ThreatBlockr specifically for this use case. Firewalls weren't built for this use case - they were built for deep packet inspection, which is a very different engineering problem.

5 — Is your team supplementing your firewall solution with other security practices?

As powerful as firewall solutions can be, they are only as strong as the humans at your organization. No matter how vigilant and advanced your security team's initiatives are, if a single employee clicks on a phishing email link, those efforts could all be for nothing.

It's important to consider cybersecurity awareness training, right alongside security solutions such as firewalls. When your employees can avoid phishing schemes and create (and rotate) secure passwords, they will contribute positively to your overall security program, making your purchased solutions all the more effective. When your IT team is rigorous about the timely installation of the latest software security patches across your entire business software ecosystem, your security posture will improve immensely.

The bottom line: firewalls aren't a magical, black box solution that can fix all security flaws. Firewalls are clearly not a silver bullet. If they were, no one would be getting hacked. Yet, here we are, in 2022, with new breaches and threats identified every day. Firewalls have their place in a security team's toolkit but need to be complemented with gap-filling solutions, methodologies, and company-wide best practices. Only then can effective cyber security truly be realized.

For organizations looking to understand what threats are getting through their existing security stacks, ThreatBlockr offers a free threat risk assessment to get a comprehensive network security audit.