Search results for firewall vendors | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Firewalls are the front-line soldiers, who sit strategically at the edge of your network and defend it from various security threats. Firewalls require constant maintenance and management to ensure that they are accurately configured for optimal security, continuous compliance, and high performance. Manual firewall configuration and change management is a time-consuming, error-prone, and headache-fraught task, especially in today’s increasingly complex and dynamic networks and, for organizations dealing with dozens, or very commonly, hundreds of individual firewalls, routers and other network security devices, manual configuration and ongoing ACL changes can quickly become a management nightmare. If not managed correctly, organizations can find themselves exposed to dangerous cyber threats and compliance risks, which can lead to costly repercussions. The key to keeping up with ever-changing and ever-growing firewall rule-sets is automation.By automating firewall configu...

Admit it. Who would not want their firewall maintenance grunt work to go away? For more than 20 years, companies either managed their edge firewall appliances or had service providers rack-and-stack appliances in their data centers and did it for them. This was called a managed firewall — an appliance wrapped with a managed service, often from a carrier or managed security service provider (MSSP). The provider assumed the management of the firewall box, its software, and even its policy and management from the over-burdened IT team. But customers ended up paying for the inefficiency of dealing with appliances (i.e. “grunt work”) because the problem just shifted to the provider. A new architecture was needed - a transformation from an appliance form factor to a true cloud service. In a 2016 Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Protection report , Gartner analyst Jeremy D'Hoinne initiated the emerging category of Firewall as a Service (FWaaS). He defined FWaaS as “ ...a fire...

Often, organizations think of firewall security as a one-and-done type of solution. They install firewalls, then assume that they are "good to go" without investigating whether or not these solutions are actually protecting their systems in the best way possible. "Set it and forget it!" Instead of just relying on firewalls and assuming that they will always protect their businesses from cyber risk, executives need to start asking deeper questions about them. As with most areas of business, it's important to take a critical look at each solution that your organization relies on for security. So, let's break down a few questions that you and your team should be asking about firewall security to get a more accurate view into your network defense posture. 1 — What does your team's firewall knowledge look like? In order to properly service and upkeep firewalls, your team needs to have at least a baseline knowledge of how firewalls operate. It's espe...

This newly discovered bugs in Java and Python is a big deal today. The two popular programming languages, Java and Python, contain similar security flaws that can be exploited to send unauthorized emails and bypass any firewall defenses. And since both the flaws remain unpatched, hackers can take advantage to design potential cyber attack operations against critical networks and infrastructures. The unpatched flaws actually reside in the way Java and Python programming languages handle File Transfer Protocol (FTP) links, where they don't syntax-check the username parameter, which leads to, what researchers call, protocol injection flaw. Java/Python FTP Injection to Send Unauthorized SMTP Emails In a blog pos t published over the past week, security researcher Alexander Klink detailed the FTP protocol injection vulnerability in Java's XML eXternal Entity (XXE) that allows attackers to inject non-FTP malicious commands inside an FTP connection request. To demonst...

At present, web applications have become the top targets for attackers because of potential monetization opportunities. Security breaches on the web application can cost millions. Strikingly, DNS (Domain Name System) related outage and Distributed denial of service (DDoS) lead a negative impact on businesses. Among the wide range of countermeasures, a web application firewall is the first line of defense. Web Application Firewall's basic function is to establish a hardened boundary to prevent certain malicious traffic types from acquiring resources. Though WAFs have been available since the late nineties, this early generation technology is no match for recent sophisticated cyber-attacks. They are not capable enough to offer full application control and visibility. With these increasing security risks, the new age web application firewall is the only solution that can provide proper protection. Traditional WAFs Died Or At Least Dying In the early days, web apps were less common...

As you know, enterprise network security has undergone significant evolution over the past decade. Firewalls have become more intelligent, threat detection methods have advanced, and access controls are now more detailed. However (and it’s a big “however”), the increasing use of mobile devices in business operations necessitates network security measures that are specifically tailored to their unique operating patterns. Yes, enterprises have invested heavily in robust network security such as firewalls, intrusion detection, and threat intelligence platforms. And yes, these controls work exceptionally well for traditional endpoints—but mobile devices operate differently! They connect to corporate Wi-Fi and public networks interchangeably. They run dozens of apps with varying trust levels. They process sensitive data in coffee shops, airports, and home offices. The challenge isn't that organizations lack security—it's that mobile devices need security con...

Data loss and theft continues to rise, and hardly a day goes by without significant data breaches hit the headlines. In January 2019 alone, 1.76 billion records were leaked, and according to IBM's Data Breach study, the average cost of each lost or stolen record has reached about $148. Most of these data leaks are because of malicious attacks, where exploitation of web application vulnerabilities is one of the most common cyber attack vectors. An application security breach is a problem facing one and all, and no matter what's the size of your company, your web applications are prone to cyber attacks. Hackers breach sites for a variety of reasons—some do it for fame, some to get competitive information, whereas some do it just for financial gains. No matter what the reason is, the cost of a security breach is always higher than the cost of protection, leading to loss of data, substantial financial losses, and most importantly, loss of customers' trust. If you a...

UTM (Unified threat management) is thought to be an all-in-one solution for cybersecurity. In general, it is a versatile software or hardware firewall solution integrated with IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) and other security services. A universal gateway allows the user to manage network security with one comprehensive solution, which makes the task much easier. In addition, compared to a conventional firewall, such systems are capable of detecting and blocking more sophisticated attacks. SafeDNS has recently released such a solution, and this is what this article is going to be about. Who needs UTMs? Most of all, UTMs are valued by SMEs - the all-in-one solution makes it simple to manage all their cybersecurity solutions and services. This also cuts down a lot of communications between vendors, since UTMs are easily supported by one IT team. This leads to another upside of the system - it can be cost-effective, as there is no need to pay a bunch of vendors & extra for tech ...

An exhaustive evaluation of three firewall models from Palo Alto Networks has uncovered a host of known security flaws impacting the devices' firmware as well as misconfigured security features. "These weren't obscure, corner-case vulnerabilities," security vendor Eclypsium said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Instead these were very well-known issues that we wouldn't expect to see even on a consumer-grade laptop. These issues could allow attackers to evade even the most basic integrity protections, such as Secure Boot, and modify device firmware if exploited." The company said it analyzed three firewall appliances from Palo Alto Networks, PA-3260, PA-1410, and PA-415, the first of which officially reached end-of-sale on August 31, 2023. The other two models are fully supported firewall platforms. The list of identified flaws, collectively named PANdora's Box , is as follows - CVE-2020-10713 aka BootHole (Affects PA-3260, PA-14...

If you are a hacker, you might have enjoyed the NSA's private zero-day exploits , malware and hacking tools that were leaked last month. But the question is: How these hacking tools ended up into the hands of hackers? It has been found that the NSA itself was not directly hacked, but a former NSA employee carelessly left those hacking tools on a remote server three years ago after an operation and a group of Russian hackers found them, sources close to the investigation told Reuters . The leaked hacking tools, which enable hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in systems from big vendors like Cisco Systems, Juniper, and Fortinet, were dumped publicly online by the group calling itself " The Shadow Brokers ." NSA officials have also admitted to the FBI that their careless employee acknowledged the error shortly afterward, and hence the agency was aware of its operative's mistake from last three years. But instead of warning the affected companies that their c...

Barracuda Networks announced on Tuesday that it will pay over $3,100 to anyone who can hack into its security products. This bug bounty program is the first of its kind from a pure-play security vendor. “This initiative reflects our commitment to our customers and the security community at large,” said Paul Judge, Chief Research Officer at Barracuda. The security firm has included its Spam & Virus Firewall, Web Filter, Web Application Firewall, and NG Firewall in the bug bounty program. Patch or Public Disclosure Last week, Google launched a bug bounty program to pay for vulnerabilities, joining many other vendors willing to pay security researchers for information about vulnerabilities. These efforts aim to fix flaws as soon as possible to prevent exploitation as zero-day attacks. Barracuda's bug bounty program will pay up to $3,133.70 for "particularly severe bugs," a nod to the slang "leet" number 31337, meaning "elite" in the security commu...

Image source: goldenfrog In an effort to continue its crackdown on VPNs, Chinese authorities have arrested a 26-year-old man for selling VPN software on the Internet. China's Supreme Court has sentenced Deng Jiewei from Dongguan in Guangdong province, close to Hong Kong, to nine months in prison for selling virtual private network (VPN) software through his own small independent website. VPN encrypts users' Internet traffic and routes it through a distant connection so that web surfers can hide their identities and location data while accessing websites that are usually restricted or censored by any country. Chinese citizens usually make use of VPNs to bypass the Great Firewall of China , also known as the Golden Shield project, which employs a variety of tricks to censor the Internet in the country. The project already blocked access to some 171 out of the world's 1,000 top websites, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, and The Pirate Bay in...

Palo Alto Networks has released software patches to address several security flaws in its Expedition migration tool, including a high-severity bug that an authenticated attacker could exploit to access sensitive data. "Multiple vulnerabilities in the Palo Alto Networks Expedition migration tool enable an attacker to read Expedition database contents and arbitrary files, as well as create and delete arbitrary files on the Expedition system," the company said in an advisory. "These files include information such as usernames, cleartext passwords, device configurations, and device API keys for firewalls running PAN-OS software." Expedition, a free tool offered by Palo Alto Networks to facilitate migration from other firewall vendors to its own platform, reached end-of-life (EoL) as of December 31, 2024. The list of flaws is as follows - CVE-2025-0103 (CVSS score: 7.8) - An SQL injection vulnerability that enables an authenticated attacker to reveal Expedition...