A firewall is an intermediary between your own intranet and the external world. Its basic function is to protect your IT infrastructure from viruses, malicious threats and other break-ins that are common in today’s internet world. A firewall test can also be used within your private network to ensure data security and restricting access to certain internal groups.
Now that you have the firewall up and running with the configured rules, how do you know if it is working as planned? The only way to answer this is by running a firewall test. Let us see how to run a firewall test? A firewall can be tested in many ways.
The Basic Of A Firewall Test
The common ones are:
Check for open ports: The best security plan while configuring ports is to keep all ports closed and open the requisite one when a reason arises. There are many port scanner tools available to check for open ports that may invite unwanted intrusions.
Once you run the firewall test with a tool, it will check the common ports (about 20 of them) and returns a list of ports along with their status. Check firewall rules: The only way to do this is to read through them.
Possibly, you may have disabled a few rules or forgot to put in rules that may have been ticked off for testing. Ignoring this part may result in trouble later.
Log Analysis: Though it may sound boring, this is a critical part of a firewall test. You can find out a lot about your firewall behavior in the log files. Make it a habit to go through your log files frequently and focus on “too many allowed connections” and “denied connections”.
These are alerts for any impending viruses or worms. Also, take a peek at denied and allowed connections and check the rules as to why the connections were denied. In conclusion, make sure that your firewall keeps working properly by applying patches as and when available, periodic firewall test and checking rules regularly.