Advanced Firewall Features Provide Critical Protection Against Cybersecurity Threats
With the risk of security breaches and data compromises constantly growing, traditional firewalls are not equipped with the capabilities financial institutions need to optimize their network security. Advanced firewalls—also known as next-generation firewalls (NGFWs)—have more complex features that can help institutions block unwanted traffic, prevent cyberattacks, and enhance their security posture. NGFWs go beyond the capacity of conventional firewalls by capitalizing on other network filtering functions.
Commonly Adopted Features Among Survey Respondents
Today many community banks and credit unions employ a variety of advanced firewall features to keep potential hackers at bay, according to the findings of Safe Systems’ 2023 Cybersecurity Outlook for Community Banks and Credit Unions survey. As expected, a majority of the 135 survey respondents use (62%), TLS/SSL traffic inspection (54%), and (41%).
Underutilized Features – Sandboxing and Dynamic Threat Feeds
Surprisingly, only 24% of survey respondents indicate that they leverage sandboxing, which provides a secure, isolated location to test possible threats like files, codes, or patches. While a small percentage have adopted this advanced feature, other research shows that 87% of security professionals report that sandboxes arm them with important information.
Another underutilized feature —33% of 81 respondents—is dynamic threat feeds which allow good network traffic in and keep bad traffic out while ensuring critical processes continue to work. Dynamic threat feeds represent a real-time, continuous data stream that collects information related to cyber risks so that institutions can act on potential or current threats. The threat feeds incorporated into the threat engines can determine where traffic begins geographically and use that location as a deciding factor—even before evaluating if the information is allowed by a firewall policy. Applying this basic logic can help institutions save valuable time and resources while protecting their environment against locations that are known to produce more security threats.
In addition to covering advanced firewall features, the 2023 Cybersecurity Outlook for Community Banks and Credit Unions survey explores several other important areas, including employee security awareness training and testing, vulnerability and patch management, Microsoft 365 services, email infrastructure, and cybersecurity preparedness.
While it is encouraging that research indicates that financial institutions are using several advanced features of NGFWs, they can do even more to take advantage of this technology. To learn more about how advanced firewalls can provide critical defense for your institution’s network security, download the complete findings of the 2023 Cybersecurity Outlook for Community Banks and Credit Unions. Or read our white paper on “Improving Security Posture Through Next-Generation Firewall Features.”