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Three Reasons to Simplify Your Network Infrastructure

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You have a growing business, so you need to add more connections: PCs, cameras, or even another location. As you grow, your IT infrastructure is getting complicated, and with every new branch office complexity becomes an issue. As this network grows, there are additional challenges when adding more connections that need to be managed by the firewall. For organizations with multiple remote sites, such as retailers and distributed enterprises, there could be hundreds of consoles to manage, leading to uncontrollable complexity and spiraling costs. Whether it’s scaling to expand a small business or already overseeing a large enterprise, managing the security of an entire distributed network necessitates a simpler and more consolidated approach that can work within tight budgets.

This seems to be a common theme for many companies, ranging from a single store to a large multi-store chain. As I see it, the challenge is the need for a simpler, more centralized approach that allows you to:

  • Securely grow the business
  • Manage security, wireless, cameras, VoIP, networking and WAN acceleration infrastructure through a centralized management console.
  • Create and deploy consistent security policies, across multiple branches or locations

Traditionally, you rely on your network expert to build out a network consisting of several dumb switches that only increase complexity and cost. This is especially true when configuring distributed networks, as each piece requires multiple consoles, increased overhead costs and the potential for misconfiguration and non-compliance. Managing success should not include dealing with increased complexity and less security.

SonicWall’s solution solves this challenge with a converged infrastructure approach. For a single installation, SonicWall lets you add more connections that are managed by the firewall, thus, delivering greater flexibility to apply granular security controls. SonicWall provides a single solution to connect all your devices, whether they be PCs and printers, or Power over Ethernet (PoE) devices (such as wireless access points and cameras). For remote installations, SonicWall’s solution lets you deliver consistent security policies that can be viewed under a single centralized management console.

To learn more about how you can grow your business while reducing complexity, click here to read our executive brief.

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SonicWall Security Announces SonicOS 6.2.5 for SonicWALL Next-Generation Firewalls

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Today, I am very excited to share with you the SonicOS 6.2.5 release for our 6th generation SonicWall TZ, NSA and SuperMassive Next-Generation firewalls. SonicOS 6.2.5 brings many new features that span across SMB, distributed enterprise and high-end deployments. Further, SonicOS 6.2.5 simplifies support for SonicWall Security partners by offering a single software platform for majority of the 6th generation  SonicWall firewalls.

Highlights of SonicOS 6.2.5

  • SMB and distributed enterprises are challenged by the diverse management solutions involved in managing the security, switching and wireless access points for their network infrastructure. With the new SonicWall X-Series switch integration feature, SonicOS 6.2.5 delivers a consolidated management of all network infrastructure including TZ firewalls, X-Series switches, SonicPoints and WAN Acceleration devices from within the TZ Series firewalls.
  • Recently published 2016 SonicWall Security Annual Threat Report highlighted the surge in encrypted traffic as one of the major trends observed in 2016. With the need to address effective TLS/SSL inspection, multiple DPI SSL Enhancements have been added to the new SonicOS 6.2.5 release. Few of these key enhancements include but not limited to ““
    • CFS category-based exclusion/inclusion of encrypted connections for efficient standards compliance (PCI, HIPPA)
    • Strengthened Encryption Methods (TLS 1.2, SHA256)
    • Increased default Certificate Authority (CA) database
    • Improved troubleshooting for encrypted connection failures with one-click exclude
    • Finer granularity for encrypted connection exclusions based on alternate domain names (excluding youtube.com vs. *.google.com)
    • Refreshed GUI for easy-to-use configuration of encrypted connection processing
    • Increased SSL Connection counts for NSA and SM Series firewalls
    • Unified Capabilities (UC) Approved Product List (APL) enhancements SonicWall firewalls are now qualified for use by Department of Defense (DoD) agencies in the United States. Multiple enhancements including addition of new administrator roles, Out-of-band management, enhanced audit logging and IPv6 features were added to support UC APL certification that is now available for all customers running SonicOS 6.2.5.
    • Firewall Sandwich support and Wire mode VLAN translation features provide flexible and scalable solutions for datacenter deployments
    • Gateway Anti-Virus Detection Only Mode to support deployments where traffic containing viruses are logged but not blocked.
    • Flexible DPI actions for administrators to exclude/include traffic by protocols/DPI service/Application rule action.
    • Botnet Source identification in AppFlow Monitor to quickly view the individual user of IP address associated with the detected applications.
    • Wireless DFS Certification for FCC U-NII (Unlicensed-National Information Infrastructure) to ensure compliance for all customer SonicWall wireless appliances (SonicPoint ACe/ACi/N2)

This is exactly what our partners and customers are asking for. Our partners are active in the SonicOS 6.2.5 beta and are looking forward to all of these rich features to provide even greater security to their customers.

“We are excited about theSonicOS 6.2.5 release because it delivers the ability to control the most crucial elements of your network from a single pane of glass. Customers can now manage the Internet Security Appliance, Secure Wireless Network, and Network Switching from a single console. This is great news for customers and IT administrators, as it simplifies administration and support. This is a big gain for distributed enterprise as well, as this release also allows each of these components to be controlled from the SonicWall Global Management System. Western NRG is excited to have this functionality available in our own GMS instance, where we support hundreds of our customers’ SonicWall’s,” said Tim Martinez, CEO of Western NRG, a premier SonicWall Partner.

With the SonicOS 6.2.5 release we have made huge strides to make the life of a security officer easier to do more with less and reduce the complexity of network management. All of the important enhancements of this release are available at no additional cost to customers with valid support contracts for SonicWall Next-Generation Firewalls or Unified Threat Management appliances. SonicOS 6.2.5 firmware is available as an Early Availability release on www.mysonicwall.com for customers with a valid support contract.

SonicOS 6.2.5 is available on the following platforms:

– SOHO W, TZ300, TZ300 W, TZ400, TZ400 W, TZ500, TZ500 W, TZ600
– NSA 2600, NSA 3600, NSA 4600, NSA 5600, NSA 6600
– SuperMassive SM 9200, SM 9400, SM 9600

To dive deeper into how to have a centrally managed network security infrastructure, download our release notes and the: The Distributed Enterprise and the SonicWall TZ – Building a Coordinated Security Perimeter.

Managing the Madness of Multiple Management Consoles with SonicWall TZ Firewall and X-Series Switches

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With fast emerging technologies, challenges of network design in distributed retail store locations is becoming huge. As retail store and distributed enterprise environments evolve, the underlying network infrastructure must evolve with the transformational changes to embrace new technologies such as mobile and digital media which aim to improve customer experience. Embracing new technological changes in a retail network needs to be carefully thought through by raising the following questions:

  1. Is the network infrastructure scalable?
  2. With the increased scale, is the network still secure?
  3. Are the operating costs increasing with the network expansion?
  4. Above all, is there still sanity prevailing in the management of such an evolved network?

The ultimate goal of a network design for any distributed retail location is to create a smart, flexible and easy-to manage platform that can scale to the specific needs of each site, while helping the organization reduce costs and risks. Typical solution of solving any network design expansion is to throw more capacity at the problem. As support for new technology and devices arise, there is overinvestment with added complexity. A new paradigm shift is necessary that can provide a converged infrastructure, simple & easy-to-use management, lower operating costs and can scale to a retail store site’s specific business need.

Let us start by understanding a typical retail store network. A retail store has many components: Point of Sale (POS) devices that require network access to process orders, multiple PoE powered devices such as IP cameras, Network devices such as storage servers & printers, multiple internal backend networks that employees need access to and above all a Guest WiFi requirement that retail customers can benefit from. Taking these attributes into account, a typical retail store design gets broken up into:

  • Multiple internal networks for employee access (for example Sales, Engineering, Finance)
  • Point-of-Sale (POS) network
  • Network devices ““ PoE Cameras, PoE/PoE+ driven Access Points, Storage Servers & Printers
  • Wireless Networks ““ Corporate internal wireless, Guest wireless

The retail network design needs to be secure, fault tolerant and interconnected. Security is typically offered by next-generation firewalls, switches provide the interconnectivity and wireless is offered through multiple access points depending on the store location size. With a scattered management design, an IT administrator is faced with the challenge of managing the network through multiple management consoles. There is the added operating cost of licensing for the various management consoles. A certain madness starts to prevail with the varied management solution as we consider troubleshooting issues in such a network.

With the newly launched SonicOS 6.2.5, SonicWall Security launched a special feature, X-Series integration, that allows for a simplified management of secure converged infrastructure across a distributed retail network by integrating SonicWall X-Series switches into a single consolidated management view that already controls SonicWall firewalls, SonicWall SonicPoints (wireless access points), and SonicWall WAN acceleration devices. Using SonicWall Global Management System (GMS), SonicWall now offers a compelling single-vendor, consolidated secure management solution for distributed retail networks. If you are an existing customer and partner looking for the latest release notes, they are posted here: https://support.software.dell.com/sonicwall-tz-series/release-notes-guides

To learn more about the design of a scalable secure retail network, download our Tech brief: Scalable, consolidated security for retail networks.

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Next Steps to Defend Against Cyber Attacks

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Whenever I start to write about cybersecurity, something else comes up. I wanted to write about last week’s cybersecurity-focused Executive Orders ““ we’ll get to them shortly ““ and then I read that in an IRS hack last month, stolen social security numbers enabled attackers to get more than 100,000 E-file PINs. The IRS says, “No personal taxpayer data was compromised or disclosed by IRS systems,” and is notifying affected taxpayers. This follows a hack reported of employees at Justice and DHS, in which the attacker used social engineering, reportedly impersonating a government worker, to gain access to agency information.

These incidents just don’t stop, do they?

Which brings us to the two new Executive Orders. One establishes a Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, the other a Federal Privacy Council. And they’ve been signed into existence during the same week that the White House submitted its budget proposal for federal FY 2017, including requests for $19 billion for cybersecurity as a whole, with $3.1 billion dedicated to getting rid of older, less secure systems. While agreement on and approval of budgets is, let’s face it, problematic in the current political climate, getting funding for cybersecurity is less problematic than for many other areas. Across the board and across the Executive branch and the Congress, leadership understands and generally supports cybersecurity initiatives, understanding the very real costs of inaction as shown by the two news items I mentioned.

The Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity’s mission is to “make detailed recommendations to strengthen cybersecurity in both the public and private sectors while protecting privacy, ensuring public safety and economic and national security, fostering discovery and development of new technical solutions, and bolstering partnerships between Federal, State, and local government and the private sector in the development, promotion, and use of cybersecurity technologies, policies, and best practices.” There’s a lot in that mission statement that’s worth pointing out. The Commission’s scope covers both public and commercial sectors, specifically mentioning state and local government along with the feds. It’s about partnership and collaboration, and about protecting privacy as we improve cybersecurity. It’s specifically tasked with strengthening identity management, cloud computing, and laying a cybersecurity foundation for the Internet of Things. The Commission will reside in the Department of Commerce and be supported by NIST, and will have until December 1 of this year to complete its activities and report out to the President. That’s a lot to ask for in ten months of work; here’s hoping that the Commission employs some variant of Agile methodology ““ as the Federal CIO did quite successfully last July with the 30-day Cybersecurity Sprint ““ in order to accomplish its mission.

While the Commission is time-delimited, the newly-established Federal Privacy Council is not, and I think that’s a good thing. The point of the council is to serve as an interdepartmental support, coordination, and collaboration mechanism for privacy standards among Cabinet department and the larger federal agencies. It will be chaired by OMB’s Deputy Director for Management and largely comprised of Senior Agency Officials for Privacy. The Council, as described in the EO, seems to be about breaking down barriers when it comes to sharing best practices and lessons learned, and reducing duplication of privacy-related efforts across agencies.

More cybersecurity funding (hopefully), more collaboration across government and industry, more coordinated and focused efforts on privacy. All three of these items are needed and appropriate steps toward improving our cybersecurity.

SonicWall Security is here to help government and industry decrease their cybersecurity risk, update older infrastructure, and improve privacy protections. Follow the links to learn more about our SonicWall One Identity solutions for identity and access management and SonicWall network security solutions for greater performance and deeper network protection.

Are School-issued Mobile Devices Safe to Use on Off-campus Networks?

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A few weeks ago my eldest son was given a Chromebook by his school which he brought to the house to do his homework. Before the Chromebook, he did his homework on the PC I had set him up with in his room. The nice thing about that is I have a firewall with a content (aka URL or web) filtering policy in place so I have control over the websites he can access since he’s getting to the internet through our home network. But not everyone has a firewall and/or content filtering to protect their kids from inappropriate and potentially harmful web content.

Schools providing K-12 students with mobile devices so that they can access content over the internet has grown over time as administrators, teachers and parents see the benefits of an untethered learning environment. A Project Tomorrow report indicates that almost half of the K-12 teachers surveyed said that their students have regular access to mobile devices in their classroom. Some of those devices are school-issued. However as students enter high school more prefer to use their own personal mobile device in the classroom whether it’s a laptop, Chromebook, tablet or smartphone.

In an earlier blog I wrote about five things K-12 schools should look for in a network security solution. One of those is web filtering. K-12 schools need a URL filtering policy in place that includes technology to protect students from inappropriate or harmful internet content if they want to be eligible for discounts through the government’s E-rate program, also known as the Schools and Libraries program. While most schools have a filtering policy in place to protect students when they’re in the classroom, what happens when they take that device home? Does the mobile device have some way to enforce the policy beyond the school’s network perimeter?

This leads me back to the story about my son’s Chromebook. Without some mechanism in place that blocks access to inappropriate websites when the device is outside the firewall he could take the Chromebook anywhere there is a Wi-Fi connection and have unrestricted internet access. From a parent’s point of view, depending on the student’s age that’s probably not a good thing. From the school’s perspective, administrators don’t want to be viewed as the provider of a tool that enables children to look up inappropriate videos, images or text without some form of control in place.

One solution school IT administrators use to solve the problem is to force all traffic from the device back through the school’s firewall once the device connects to the internet. The nice part about this approach is that the school can use the same policy whether the device is inside or outside the firewall perimeter. There is some downside though. Routing all traffic from every school-issued device regardless of its location back through the school network consumes valuable bandwidth which can be costly.

A unique solution SonicWall offers is our Content Filtering Client. Residing locally on the Windows, Chrome OS or Mac OS X mobile device, the client extends web filtering policy enforcement to devices used outside the firewall perimeter. Administrators can apply the same policy or a different one depending on whether the student is using the device is being used inside or outside the network. The device will also switch over to the inside policy once it reconnects to the school’s network. The combination of the Content Filtering Service and Content Filtering Client provides “inside/outside” web filtering coverage.

If you’re an IT director or administrator with responsibility for implementing network security and content filtering across the school district and would like to learn more about Dell SonicWALL Content Filtering Services and why they are an essential component of your network security strategy, read our technical white paper titled “K-12 network security: A technical deep-dive playbook.”

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Three Core Network Security Tips From a K-12 IT Expert

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Every moment of every day, anyone or any organization, government or institution – including K-12 – can fall victim to the latest threats and cyber-attacks. If you’re accountable for the network security of an entire school district, you know your success rests largely on everyone understanding and staying current with today’s complex and dynamic risk environment and how to avoid it.

K-12 IT expert Larry Padgett bears this out: “The most important thing is to get everybody to agree that technology security is everyone’s game, everybody on campus, and every division, department and schools must be fully engaged. Otherwise, it is going to be very difficult to be successful.”

Larry is the Director of IT Infrastructure, System Support, Security, and Governance for the School District of Palm Beach County (SDPBC). A career technology leader for more than 29 years, Larry oversees an IT infrastructure that is considered larger than the Coca-Cola® Company in terms of the number of ports and how his networks are laid out. SDPBC is one of the largest school district in the United States, with 187 schools and 225,000 thousands user accounts under management, including students, faculty, and general staff.

I had the privilege of meeting Larry at the 2015 SonicWall World Conference in Austin, Texas, where I had the opportunity to ask him specifically about the things that he is doing differently that allowed SDPBC to be successful.

Larry explained how security vendors typically talk about security as a layered approach but it can’t end there. He then described SDPBC’s winning approach to security rests on three core pillars: people, process and technology.

You must identify those who are, and who aren’t, fully engaged in exercising cyber hygiene within your district. You are responsible for every PC, servers and applications on your network. You’ll need to know if you are getting support from the board and leadership level down to everyone in the district.

People

  • How do you know if they are knowledgeable about security?
  • Can they identify the risks?
  • Do they all understand the risks?
  • What trial and test do you have in place to measure how knowledgeable they are about security?

If they’re not all engaged, you’re simply not going to be as successful as you could be. If they’re not as knowledgeable as they need to be, you would want to start discussing security as an everyday topic in your staff meetings, in the classrooms and, more importantly, in your executive and board room discussions. If security isn’t one of the top topics on the board agenda, you have much important work to do to get their buy-in, because nowadays, security is a key risk metric. Your ultimate goal is to get everybody to agree that security is everyone’s game so they become proactively involved in helping your institution be successful.

Process

When there are people involved, you also need to have processes in place that would allow you to make sure that you are doing the right things, that they are doing them well and that what they do is actually effective for the state of business you’re currently operating in.

  • What processes are you using?
  • Have you written them down?
  • How do you know if they are being followed?
  • How are they monitored and measured?

These are questions that enable you to think through all of the risks that you’re going to mitigate, and follow-through with implementing robust security policies and practices that can help put you in a better position for success.

Technology

Begin embracing a layered security approach as part of your defense-in-depth framework, because it provides you an effective and proactive way to help fend off today’s advanced threats. At a minimum, the top five security services that you must have as part of your layered security defense are:

  1. A capable intrusion prevention system with threat detection services that can provide complete anti-evasion and inbound anti-spam, anti-phishing and anti-virus protection
  2. SSL inspection to detect and prevent today’s advance evasive tactics and compromised web sites from sneaking malware into your network though the use of encryption
  3. Around-the-clock threat counter-intelligence for your next-generation firewalls and intrusion prevention systems, so you can receive the latest countermeasures to combat new vulnerabilities as they are discovered
  4. Email filtering and encryption to secure both inbound and outbound communications
  5. Security for endpoints, since most network infections begin with a compromised user device

Avoid Making a Costly Network Security Shortlist Decision

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Living the life of a chief security officer (CSO), chief information security officer (CISO) or any title with the word “security” in it nowadays is surely a heart-wrenching experience each day. Far too often, yet another data breach in the news reminds you of the obvious notion that it’s not a matter of if but when you’ll be called upon to manage and contain a security incident in your organization. Regardless of its depth and severity, this has to be very disturbing and there seems to be no end. As a result, you find yourself regularly worrying if you’ve done a thorough job at vetting your cyber-defense system, and determining if it is really doing its job to prevent avoidable attacks on your networks. You understand the stakes. If any part of your security strategy is not functioning at its optimal level, you know your organization is susceptible to countless security risks. The bottom line is you don’t ever want to stand in front of the executives explaining why the company is breached, and dealing with the after-math as a result of a failure in one or more of your security layers. There is a way, however, to help you avoid such a disaster.

Limited resources and shortage of security staff can constrain your ability to carry out a rigorous vendor vetting process. The fundamental question then is what alternatives are there to help you efficiently select potential technologies that can put you in a position of strength and success against evolving threats. As a security leader, you’ve been down this road many times. You‘re aware that choosing the right technology partner with capable solutions to support your security strategy for the long-term is one of the most nerve-wracking but crucial task you must undertake. The range of capabilities and factors impacting your choice are overwhelming. You understand very well that making a poor choice could end up costing your organization millions in breach remediation expenses, immeasurable brand damage, loss of public confidence and possibly even your career. To help avoid such a costly decision when shortlisting possible vendors and their solutions for proof of concept (PoC) consideration or making the purchase, there are highly specialized market research companies that are well-recognized by the security industry for their reputable and impartial validation of network security quality and effectiveness that you can confidently use when making your selections.

The difficulty here is that there are many market research companies available. Most have specialization in a variety of technologies including network security. And to make things a little more complicated, each has it its own definition, criteria and approach to how vendors are evaluated and graded for their security effectiveness, performance and cost of ownership. The results often vary among them especially those that are vendor-sponsored research. Subsidized research and testing are always skewed to make one vendor’s product more favorable than its rival. And as such, these kind of reports lack objectivity, are seldom reliable from a technical perspective, and should not be viewed as serious research. So who should I depend on? Who do I need to stay clear of? Should I trust its finding completely? Where do I start? These are some good questions to help set clear direction and decision points. From our point of view, a good place to start is to give greater attention to independent research companies that are self-funded, has zero connection to any one vendor and focus exclusively on cyber-security. More importantly, you would also want the research to be fully verified by extensive public testing using different permutation of actual real-world use cases that best match your unique security environment requirements.

One particular company has differentiated itself in the IT security category over the past few years: NSS Labs. It is now broadly recognized as the world’s trusted authority in providing unbiased, independent, security product test reports and security intelligence services. NSS Labs reporting can help you shortlist vendors and their products based on empirical laboratory test results as opposed to fuzzy marketing, product surveys, opinion based analysis and/or peer-to-peer recommendation. The NSS Labs Test report is the ultimate validation of network security performance, resiliency and efficacy under various network traffic mixes and loads that mimic real-world use cases.  Download a free copy of the NSS Labs Test Report to gain knowledge of key performance indicators essential to the success of your cyber-defense strategy.

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Are Campus Defenses Keeping Up with Attacks from the Cyber Netherworld?

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I took a computer science minor when I was in college. Back then, the school computers were in a heavily secured section of one building, and we accessed them from teletype terminals and punch card readers (no, we did not use charcoal on slates by the fireplace in the log cabin!). There was no reason to worry about the security of our computer work, other than needing to stay on the good side of the staff of the computer center so that they wouldn’t reshuffle our punch cards or “misplace” our printouts.

Fast forward more than a few years, when I was doing graduate work at a public university. I took 30 credits online, using recordings of on-campus classes, regular chat sessions with my instructors and fellow students, and accessing research information, including public and professionals-only data sources, through the school’s online library system and its global connections. I didn’t pay too much attention to the security of my online activities; internet connectivity made them possible, but there weren’t nearly the number of bad actors out on the net that there are today.

Today my son is in college, and it’s natural for him to select a mix of online and in-person classes, even though his school is a short drive away. He relies on his school’s IT infrastructure for classwork, exams, registration, and research, and can access these functions as well as find out anything about what is available on the internet–from his laptop or smartphone. And every one of those transactions takes place in a space that is just seething with cyber muggers, burglars, and every variety of malicious actor you can imagine.

Information is the stock in trade of colleges and universities. Information enables students to pursue their degrees, faculty to teach and research, and staff to keep these institutions running. Much of the information has real value in the cyber netherworld, whether it’s personally identifiable information of students, proprietary research conducted with other schools and industry partners, or financial transactions.

Keeping this information secure is a challenge. In a recent Center for Digital Education survey of higher education IT professionals, 72 percent listed data breaches among their greatest current network security concerns. Their top security concerns for the year ahead? Spam, phishing, and malware. What’s standing in the way of better network security? More than four out of five pointed to budget constraints.

Keeping campus networks secure in the face of ever-increasing growth of data, devices used to access that data, and cyber threats requires more effective and more cost-effective security. To learn more about what’s keeping campus IT leaders up at night, and what they’re doing about it, view our on-demand webcast, Network Security in Education: The changing landscape of campus data security.

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Network Security Designs for Your Retail Business

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The 2015 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) estimate of $400 million financial loss from security breaches show the importance of managing the breaches and ensuring appropriate security infrastructure is put in place. Retail industry saw high-profile retail breaches this year through RAM scraping malware aimed at point-of-sale (POS) systems. The security breaches affect both large and small organizations. According to Verizon 2015 DBIR, attackers gained access to POS devices of small organizations through brute-force while larger breaches were a multi-step attack with some secondary system being breached before attacking the POS system. This article highlights the key design considerations to build and deploy a secure, scalable and robust retail network.

Secure Network Design Considerations

Organizations need to ensure that their networks are resilient, secure and robust. Security solution put in place must not be a knee-jerk reaction to an attack but rather a comprehensive protection solution. A typical retail location requirement includes support for POS systems, Guest Wi-Fi access, Employee access to restricted resources, third party vendor access to limited resources and reliable Internet connection with no downtime. Given these requirements, following strategies are recommended in the retail network design –

1. Network Segmentation – It is important to segment the retail network into multiple networks. This ensures that an attack on a particular device in a network does not infest the entire network. A simple, flat network design is an easy access for an infested POS terminal to bring the entire network down. Create separate networks for – POS terminals, Guest Wi-Fi devices, Employee access to restricted information and 3rd party vendor access (limited & appropriate access).

2. Access Control – Install strict access controls on all network segments to ensure how devices communicate within and across network segment(s).

3. VPN Tunnels – Create site-to-site VPN tunnels between retail location and centralized data center location to ensure all traffic originating from a POS system is always encrypted. Typically customer sensitive credit card information is encrypted when validating over internet. However, simple management data such as login credentials may not be encrypted and could pose an entry point for a security breach.

4. Security – SonicWall 2015 Annual Threat Report findings show 109% increase in the encrypted connection traffic from last year. This potentially means that attackers could be using encryption as a way to hide their malware from firewalls. It is imperative to use a Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) that performs deep packet inspection on all traffic including encrypted ones. Deep packet inspection services such as Intrusion Prevention, Malware detection and Content Filtering are strongly recommended to reduce the risk of intrusions and malware attacks. Additionally, enable endpoint anti-virus on all POS terminals for increased security.

5. Reliability – Retail networks need to be secure, and fault tolerant with zero-downtime. For fault tolerance at smaller retail location, it is recommended to use 3G/4G backup failovers with a multi-ISP provider strategy. For heavier traffic retail location, NGFWs deployed in High-Availability mode provides for un-interrupted connectivity.

6. Guest Wi-Fi – Retail locations are increasingly using guest Wi-Fi access as a means to increase their business and stickiness with customers. For guest Wi-Fi, create a locked-down Internet-only network access for visitors or untrusted network nodes. Choose a solution that provides guest services with the latest wireless technology such as 802.11ac for increased bandwidth.

The SonicWall Next Generation Firewall based security solution provides an integrated approach to addressing all the requirements of a typical retail network. For more information on best practices for securing your retail network, download this white paper.

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Increase Your Network Security and Control Through Segmentation

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When you think about securing down a network using a next-generation firewall, in most cases the process immediately goes from the Internet to the local area network (LAN). This may be a good way of thinking if you only have hard wired desktop clients. However what if the network includes servers that need inbound access from the Internet or a wireless network? What steps can you take to protect a network that’s a little more sophisticated?

Let’s look at an example of a small network where the user has a few desktop clients connected to the physical LAN, wireless clients and a storage server. For this specific use case the network segmentation is set up in the following way. The LAN network has all of the desktop clients, a wireless LAN (WLAN) network for the wireless clients and a de-militarized zone (DMZ) where the storage server is connected.

From the LAN, clients are allowed to get to the Internet, but access to the other network segments is blocked. This includes the default policy to block all incoming access from the WAN or Internet.

For the wireless users, they can get to the internet but are blocked from accessing any of the other network segments. In order for the wireless users to access other network segments they must authenticate to the firewall. Once authenticated, each wireless user can gain access to the other network segments as needed. This was done to increase security from the WLAN and prevent unauthorized access to the other network segments.

Finally, on the storage server segment, the default policy is to block access to all other network segments. This is done to ensure that if the storage server was to become compromised by a vulnerability to its software it would not allow a hacker gain access or malware to spread to other network segments on the LAN or WLAN. For WAN access, all traffic is blocked, although a specific set of ports is allowed to provide the ability to automatically update the software on the storage server.

Now you may look at this and be thinking this is overkill for such a small network. However being in the security industry for the past 15 years and educating partners and customers on proper network designed I figured it would only benefit my own network security by implementing a security design that limits access between network segments.

While I’m not saying that all networks need to have this level of complexity, it is a good idea to think about network segmentation and not put all connected devices on a single segment just because it’s easy. The network segmentation will help to control traffic not only north and south, but also provide controls for traffic going east and west between network segments.

SonicWall NSA Next-Gen Firewall Series

With the SonicWall firewalls it’s possible to create a wide variety of segments using either physical or logical interfaces or the internal wireless radio if available. Once an interface is defined, you can then apply a zone classification such as LAN, DMZ, WLAN or custom, and from there apply policies to control access between the various segments and limit unauthorized access. For increased security you can also apply authentication requirements as well. To learn more about how SonicWall next-generation firewalls can help secure your network read the “Achieve Deeper Network Security and Control” white paper.

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