Administering a business firewall: access, rules, changes and firmware

Skills you'll practise

• Describe how management access to a firewall should be restricted (no admin services on the WAN, named accounts, MFA, trusted sources)
• Prioritize a firmware update using the vendor's advisory and the CISA KEV catalog, and plan it with a backup and a rollback route
• Take, protect and test a configuration backup
• Review a rule base for over-broad, stale and unlogged rules and propose changes through change control
• Choose between site-to-site and remote-access VPN for a stated need and name the controls each needs
• Explain why firewall logs should be sent to a separate log server and what to check when they stop

Course outline

1. 1.Administering a business firewallVideo · 2 min
2. 2.Protecting the firewall itselfLesson · 17 min
3. 3.Backups, rules and change controlLesson · 17 min
4. 4.VPNs and loggingLesson · 16 min
5. 5.Administering a business firewall: access, rules, changes and firmware: knowledge checkKnowledge check · 16 questions
6. 6.Final exam10 questions · passing it completes the course, so people who already know the material can test out

Sources it draws on

The lessons and questions are written from these references, so learners can go back to the original.

• NIST SP 800-41 Rev. 1: Guidelines on Firewalls and Firewall Policy
• CISA: Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog (use it as an input to vulnerability prioritization)
• NIST SP 800-77 Rev. 1: Guide to IPsec VPNs
• NIST SP 800-92: Guide to Computer Security Log Management