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Security Profiling, Assessment & Remediation Kit.

SysLog Best Practice:

Bad, Better, and the Best

In this case a new IT team member has configured the firewall in a haste to catch up with a sudden go live, forgets to enable Security profiles for all the ‘allow-traffic policies’ as his priority at that moment to ensure seamless traffic flow. Standard security profiles include anti-virus, anti-malware, vulnerability checks, URL Restrictions etc. Things run smoothly in the business for the next 6 months, and everyone was under the perception that all is well. Suddenly an incident occurs disrupting the business as usual which is traced to a cyber attack. The legal team assigns the task of investigation to a third party, whose first step is to seek access to the log files of all the firewalls for the previous 6 months till the point of time of the incident. The IT team gives all the log files of the other devices which maintained logs except the one which let them down as logging was not enabled. The root cause could not be established satisfactorily with evidence, and this is a bad precedent.

In another case a Sr. IT team member, configures the firewalls, enables Syslog server profile and configured syslog server and enables some Log settings 3 out of 6, forgets to enable rest in the heat of a release. The business IT operations run smoothly for the next 3 quarters until an incident strikes that appears to be a cyber attack. The legal team assigns the investigation to a third party and they gain access to all the log files for each firewall. The investigators analyze all the logs and discover that a particular firewall has logs that did not consider certain parameters and hence they arrived at the vulnerability that’s the root cause. They provide remediation roadmap and curative recovery measures to contain the loss in a reactive approach post the incident.This is a better yet mediocre precedent. In another case a seasoned IT team member, configures the firewalls, enables Syslog server profile and configured syslog server and enables some Log settings 3 out of 6, forgets to enable rest in the heat of a release. Fortunately the business has subscribed to SPARK and runs scans on firewall syslog configurations whenever there is a change. SPARK analyzes the configuration and ensures syslog is enabled and correctly configured or not, that is, if all the ideally recommended parameters are considered or not. It generates a report that clearly precisely identifies which parameters of the syslog haven’t been considered. Additionally, SPARK generates a score, an indicator which in this case will not be as impressive and high as in the case where all the parameters are considered inside syslog configuration. This is a just-in-time vulnerability detection and a remediation recommendation that helps the business to avert risks and related issues emanating from that root cause. Thus preventing downtime, disruption of operations, without denting the image of the business among customers and investors. This is the best precedent averting the risks from relegating into actual issues.