Stay secure with our latest firewall updates, trends, and expert insights in information security to protect your digital assets effectively.
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Background for this topic.
Firewalls are security controls that permit or block network connections according to policy. They can operate at network boundaries, between internal segments, on individual hosts, or in cloud environments. Basic rules use addresses, ports, protocols, and connection state; more advanced firewalls may inspect applications or encrypted traffic where configured. Their purpose is to limit which systems can communicate, not to determine that all permitted traffic is safe.
Security depends heavily on accurate policy and maintenance. Overly broad, obsolete, or conflicting rules can expose services or allow unnecessary lateral movement, while unmanaged administrative interfaces and unpatched firewall software create additional attack surfaces. Practitioners should restrict management access, apply least-privilege rules, review and remove exceptions, and monitor logs for unexpected connections and policy changes. Firewall logs can support investigation, but encryption, evasion, and traffic allowed by policy may limit what the control can detect.
Outage Briefly Took Down Zoom, LinkedIn and Other WebsitesContent delivery network giant Cloudflare is investigating a brief outage early Friday that took down multiple websites. The incident marks the second outage in the span of a month, although the causes are unrelated. It stemmed from how Cloudflare's web application firewall parses requests.
Marquis Software Solutions Says Ransomware Group Hit SonicWall Device, Stole DataMarketing and compliance software maker Marquis Software Solutions, which counts over 700 banks and credit unions as customers, said a ransomware group breached its SonicWall firewall and stole hundreds of thousands of individuals' personal details, including Social Security numbers.