About Us | Contact Us
View Cart

When is a Firewall Not Enough?

By Jolley | Hadaway | Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - Leave a Comment

Many new firewalls come with Intrusion Prevention Systems, but can’t replace the services of a MSSP.


A Jolley | Hadaway Article


ServIcons_ITAudit_01Many Clients ask a great question related to network monitoring.  The question goes like this:  Firewalls now come with various services including Intrusion Prevention Systems, (IPS). Why pay a firm like infotex to provide IPS if we can bring that in-house?  Can we cut that out of the MSSP engagement budget, and handle it ourselves, like AVS or Patch Management.

Our recommendation:  do both.  Pay the small subscription fee to have IPS on your firewall and run that BEHIND an MSSP’s service.

However, be clear that hiring a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) to provide IPS and relying on the IPS on your Firewall are two separate, distinct, and different layers of security.  An MSSP provides much more than IPS if your engagement is designed correctly.  But let’s just focus on IPS, as provided by infotex.

Unlike IPS provided as a part of your firewall subscription, IPS from an MSSP is a Managed Service, meaning we staff 21 shifts a week with seasoned data security analysts to watch the system in real time.  We ensure signatures are completely up-to-date and all operating systems are patched, etc. But more importantly, we watch the alerts, logs, warnings, etc. coming off the system in real time.  We correlate IPS events back to other precursors (such as event logs or current known attack vectors)  and we of course look for trends.

With an MSSP, a team of people is there to respond to the latest zero day attacks, learning from what we’re seeing on peer networks and in threat feeds as well as our Clients networks. Our staff can see the behavior of an attack that signatures have not yet been written to discover. This is the primary advantage of a managed service over an out-of-the-box IPS.

Rather than the Client having to handle tuning and retuning and updating everything related to the intrusion prevention system, we handle it. However, we definitely encourage our clients to run an added layer of protection such as an IPS on their own firewall, parallel to ours, as an added layer of security.

Many attacks do not arrive in nice easily packaged and predictable forms, especially when they first begin to arise.  Thus, having human beings watch the system–the fact that gray matter is involved in the response process 24 x 7 x 365–makes a managed IPS system far superior than one out-of-the-box.


Article by Dan Hadaway and Matt Jolley


same_strip_012513


 

Latest News
    Artificial intelligence carries risk, but so does organic ignorance … Another one of those Dan’s New Leaf Posts, meant to inspire thought about IT Governance . . . . At a recent conference, I noticed two camps emerging in the debate over artificial intelligence. Some people embrace AI as a tool, while others support Elon […]
    PRESS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE BUSINESS NEWS NEW EMPLOYEE FOR INFOTEX We are pleased to announce the appointment of Nathan Taylor as our new Network Administrator at infotex.  “We are very excited to have Nathan join our team as a Network Administrator and look forward to his contributions to maintaining and improving our infrastructure!” […]
    about artificial intelligence . . . And who will protect us from it . . .  Another one of those Dan’s New Leaf Posts, meant to inspire thought about IT Governance . . . . Just watched some press on the the Senate hearings over regulating AI. The normal senator faces, Sam Altman of OpenAI, […]
    The Evolution of an Inside Term Used in our Vendor Risk Report Another one of those Dan’s New Leaf Posts, meant to inspire thought about IT Governance . . . . Those who audit infotex know that our vendor risk report refers to a couple of our providers as “ransomware companies.” This reference started evolving […]
    Another awareness poster for YOUR customers (and users). Now that we have our own employees aware, maybe it’s time to start posting content for our customers! Check out posters.infotex.com for the whole collection! Download the large versions here: Awareness Poster (Portrait) Awareness Poster (Landscape) You are welcome to print out and distribute this around your […]
    New tools could allow unskilled attackers to launch increasingly sophisticated attacks… An article review. Imagine a world where you receive a call from your boss asking you to assist them with something… only it’s not your boss, but an AI being used by an attacker.  This isn’t science fiction, it’s an actual attack that has […]
    Unavailability Strikes Where it doesn’t matter anyway Another one of those Dan’s New Leaf Posts, meant to inspire thought about IT Governance . . . . So, I’m writing today’s article from a resort in the middle of Wisconsin.  I want to make sure I’m staying on top of my New Leaf, which is to […]
    . . . and the importance of segregated response. The latest edition of Executive Vice President, Michael Hartke’s article series! In 2007 when I first joined infotex, coming from small to medium sized business general IT support into the world of cybersecurity, the one thing that was very hard for me to internally rectify was […]
    How concerts can help us understand APTs . . . Especially if you use your imagination! Another one of those Dan’s New Leaf Posts, meant to inspire thought about IT Governance . . . . My daughter reminded me of a concert Stacey and I attended way back in 2013, in Chicago.  It was one […]
    Mutiny! The Malicious Insider Threat Webinar Registration A Webinar-Video It is often awkward to bring up the one attack vector most of us have not addressed. The malicious insider threat. Even if we can flaunt all statistics and claim that the likelihood of an insider attack is low in our bank, the impact is still […]