Behind the Wall: What Firewalls Really See, Block, and Miss

#cybersecurity #security #discuss #networking

Hi everyone 👋

Just a quick question to you.

You have a firewall, right?

Well, your IT team has probably done the setup. It's gone live. And now you think you're protected.

But when was the last time you actually asked: what are the firewall's limitations?

This is what a majority of security presentations won't disclose:

→ According to statistics, more than 90% of online traffic is encrypted and most of the time firewalls are not able to access it.

→ Firewalls are designed to regulate the flow of data primarily between the internal network and the internet (north-south). So intruders can freely move around within your network (east-west) without being detected.

→ According to research, 95% of the cases where unauthorized access to firewalls take place happen due to errors in the configuration and not because of highly skilled hackers.

→ In the incident of Capital One data breach in 2019, here were more than 100 million customer records compromised due to a single misconfigured rule.

It's not that the firewall failed. The failure was the notion that just installing a firewall will be sufficient.

I've done a comprehensive research starting from the first firewall US prototype (UC Davis, 1988) and leading up to Zero Trust security concept, which fundamentally does away with the idea of a perimeter in security.

📌 Behind the Wall: What Firewalls Really See, Block, and Miss
🔗 Full article: https://vickkykruzprogramming.dev/blog/behind-the-wall-what-firewalls-really-see-block-and-miss

This post will definitely be helpful for those working in IT, security, networking, or generally handling any business infrastructure.

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