Hi Andrea,
Any firewalls should do the below mentioned things to keep the network secured.
1) You real IP's of the internal network should not be exposed to outside world.
2) Always its mandate to block as much as possible on the outside interface i.e the traffic that comes from the outside world to your internal network.
3)Always keep focus on the encrypted way of communication.... VPN/Some other encryption especially when it accesed from unprotected zone.
4) Block the vulnerable protocols example icmp...
5) Preferred to use CLI instead of GUI.
6) Inspection to be performed on critical protocols.
7) Make it specific instead of any any traffic.
8) Syslog should be available for the logs... for artifacts and for the regular audits.
9) IPS/IDS should be inplace incase of internet firewall.
10) Update the patches whenever to match with the latest standards and well protected as required for your network.
11) Keep the management access very specfic i.e it should on the seperate interface or on a well protected zone.
We can keep on adding like this...... when we talk about hardening
By
Karthik
