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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

The dirty secrets of network firewalls

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Sophos, a global leader in network and endpoint security, today announced the findings of its global survey, The Dirty Secrets of Network Firewalls, which revealed that IT managers cannot identify 45 per cent of their organisation’s network traffic. In fact, nearly one-in-four cannot identify 70 per cent of their network traffic. The lack of visibility creates significant security challenges for today’s businesses and impacts effective network management. The survey polled more than 2,700 IT decision makers from mid-sized businesses in 10 countries including the US, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, UK, Australia, Japan, India and South Africa.


Considering the debilitating impact cyberattacks can have on a business, it’s unsurprising that 84 per cent of respondents agree that a lack of application visibility is a serious security concern. Without the ability to identify what’s running on their network, IT managers are blind to ransomware, unknown malware, data breaches and other advanced threats, as well as potentially malicious applications and rogue users. Network firewalls with signature-based detection are unable to provide adequate visibility into application traffic due to a variety of factors such as the increasing use of encryption, browser emulation, and advanced evasion techniques.


“If you can’t see everything on your network, you can’t ever be confident that your organisation is protected from threats.


IT professionals have been ‘flying blind’ for too long and cybercriminals take advantage of this,” said Dan Schiappa, senior vice president and general manager of products at Sophos. “With governments worldwide introducing stiffer penalties for data breach and loss, knowing who and what is on your network is becoming increasingly important. This dirty secret can’t be ignored any longer.”


On average, organisations spend seven working days remediating 16 infected machines per month. Smaller organisations (100-1,000 users) spend on average five working days remediating 13 machines, while larger organisations (1,001-5,000 users) spend on average 10 working days remediating 20 machines per month, according to the survey.


“A single network breach often leads to the compromise of multiple computers, so the faster you can stop the infection from spreading the more you limit the damage and time needed to clean it up,” said Schiappa.


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