Techniques and complexity of cyber attackers change with the digital surroundings. For decades, the traditional firewall guarded network perimeters by letting or prohibiting traffic depending on source IP address, destination IP address, and port number as a digital bouncer. Though vital, complicated, multi-layered dangers businesses now face are surpassing these basic security technologies. Conventional firewalls reveal important weaknesses, which calls for more advanced, context-aware security. Next-generation firewalls offer the extra tools required to fight present cyber-attacks.
Growing Blind Areas of Traditional Firewalls
Up to Layer 4 of the OSI model, the Transport layer, traditional firewalls run. Remembering active connections, they perform simple packet filtering and stateful header inspection. Data packet contents as well as program transmitting or receiving traffic are invisible to them. This creates big blind areas. Modern attacks usually use normal ports or application vulnerabilities (Layer 7) to communicate maliciously, therefore invisible to a regular firewall.
Second-Generation Firewall
The next generation firewalls were developed to enhance security since conventional methods had significant flaws. Although they provide important functionality, next-generation firewalls build on stateful inspection. A basic distinction is DPI, which enables the firewall check data packet contents instead of headers. This lets an NGFW find the application of the traffic independent of the port. Application-layer awareness is essential since it lets security policies be defined by application or user identity, therefore offering granularity and intelligence not possible with past firewall systems.
Enhanced Modern Defense Capacity
Beyond thorough inspection and application awareness, a modern next-generation firewall incorporates sophisticated security elements used to need separate devices. An intrusion prevention system (IPS) aggressively searches for and blocks known attacks and destructive behavior. Crucially, NGFWs can combine anti-malware engines with feeds of external threat intelligence. By means of real-time updates on new threats, zero-day exploits, and hostile IP addresses or domains, this relationship enables proactive defense of the next generation firewalls. Sandboxing lets dubious files be securely run in an isolated environment to evaluate whether they are hazardous before they compromise the network. More attacks can be seen and neutralized by next-generation firewalls than by their predecessors.
Keep an eye for more latest news & updates on 24 Business Time!
