Your firewall is more important than you may think.

Ransomware is more prominent now than ever before. With devastating attacks continuing to control governments, educational organisations and business operations in multiple states, countries & Continents, with Texas recently under fire from a single Hacker, who took control of more than 23 organisations by himself.

Capital One was also in the news not too long ago, having been torn apart for its data.

Accurate strikes can start in several unprecedented methods – some with a basic phishing email, others with hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in networks in order to jump onto other systems within the network.

One of the most devastating ransomware attacks to happen in years, ensuing a worldwide disturbance, was when Capital One’s networks were manipulated and weaknesses were blown wide open to the public.

Since the assault, new susceptibilities have been detected, but there are still various systems out there that are highly susceptive to cyber-attacks.

Unfortunately, many of these poorly written networks are heaped with problems that are easily ‘wormable’, which otherwise means hackers & malicious software can exploit these gaps in an automated method with no user contact at all, enabling the malware to spread proficiently to a wide group of systems. In other words, taking over your entire infrastructure in moments.

Implementing an industry-leading protection product and managing a strict patch management strategy are the most advantageous practices. But there are also other good quality arrangements you should consider helping keep ransomware, hackers & threats out of your network to begin with.

Your firewall provides crucial security against exploits by sealing or guarding vulnerable ports, as well as preventing strikes using an Intrusion Prevention System. IPS looks at network traffic for opportunities, exploits, and stops any attempt for attackers to get through your network border or even cross borders & segments within your internal network.

Here are the firewall essentials to avoid ransomware attacks from accessing your Business network:

Decrease the surface area of attack: Examine and re-examine all port-forwarding rules to reduce any non-essential open ports. Where possible use VPN to access resources on the internal network from outside rather than port-forwarding.
Launch IPS protection: Apply proper IPS protection to the rules governing traffic to/from any Windows hosts on your network.
Decrease the threat of lateral movement: Safeguard against threats moving laterally on your network and consider segmenting your LANs into smaller sub-nets, assigning those to separate zones that are secured by the firewall. Apply suitable IPS policies to rules governing the traffic traversing these zones to prevent worms and bots from spreading between LAN segments.

Want to get the best solution for your business?

At Cloudscape, we take a security-first approach to technology – ensuring our client’s systems are best protected.

If you have any concerns, questions or simply want to explore how to better secure your business, please do get in touch with the team for a FREE demonstration, consultation to explore how exposed your business might be and identify actions to take.

To book a consultation or to arrange a further discussion, please get in touch.