Document:Data Center Best Practice Security Policy

Log Intra Data Center Traffic That Matches the Intrazone Allow Rule

Data centers are a good place for attackers to hide because security often focuses on users and overlooks servers. Log east-west traffic between servers and look for anomalous behaviors that may indicate the presence of an attacker.

By default, all intrazone traffic (source and destination in the same zone) is allowed. After the firewall evaluates Security policy, it either allows traffic controlled by application whitelist rules, denies traffic controlled by block rules, or if intrazone traffic matches no rules, the firewall allows it by default. (The firewall blocks interzone traffic by default.) Because of the valuable nature of data center assets, the best practice is to monitor all traffic inside the data center between data center servers, including traffic allowed by the intrazone default allow rule.

To gain visibility into this traffic, enable logging on the intrazone-default rule when it applies to traffic within zones inside the data center. Logging this traffic gives you the opportunity to examine access that you have not explicitly allowed and which you may want to either explicitly allow by modifying a whitelist rule or explicitly block.

In Define the Initial Intra-Data-Center Traffic Security Policy, we used three example zones inside the data center: Web-Server-Tier-DC, App-Server-Tier-DC, and DB-Server-Tier-DC. In this example, we create a custom report to gather log information about data center intrazone traffic in these three internal data center zones.

Select the intrazone-default row in the rulebase and click

Override

to enable editing the rule.

Select the

intrazone-default

rule name to edit the rule.

On the Actions tab, select

Log at Session End

and click

Create a custom report to monitor traffic that hits this rule for the internal data center zones.

Select

Monitor

Manage Custom Reports

Add

a report and give it a descriptive

Name

. In this example, the name is

Log Intrazone-Default Rule-DC

Set the

Database

Traffic Summary

Select the

Scheduled

box.

From

Available Columns

, add

Application

Risk of App

Rule

, and

Threat

to the

Selected Columns

list. If there are other types of information you want to monitor, select those as well.

Set the desired

Time Frame

Sort By

, and

Group By

values. In this example, the selected values are

Threats

and

App Category

, respectively.

Define the query to match traffic that matches the intrazone-default rule for the data center zones:

(rule eq interzone-default) and ((zone eq Web-Server-Tier-DC) or (zone eq App-Server-Tier-DC) or (zone eq DB-Server-Tier-DC))

The query filters for traffic that matches the interzone default rule and also matches any of the three internal data center zones that we defined. Because the default

Selected Columns

include zones, the report shows the zone for each session. In a real-world data center, you would probably have more zones and you would add each zone to the query. The resulting custom report settings look like this:

Commit

the changes.

Document:Data Center Best Practice Security Policy

Log Intra Data Center Traffic That Matches the Intrazone Allow Rule

Log Intra Data Center Traffic That Matches the Intrazone Allow Rule

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