: Log Intra Data Center Traffic That Matches the Intrazone Allow Rule
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Log Intra Data Center Traffic That Matches the Intrazone Allow Rule

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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 allow list 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 an allow 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.
  1. Select the intrazone-default row in the rulebase and click
    Override
    to enable editing the rule.
  2. Select the
    intrazone-default
    rule name to edit the rule.
  3. On the Actions tab, select
    Log at Session End
    and click
    OK
    .
  4. Create a custom report to monitor traffic that hits this rule for the internal data center zones.
    1. Select
      Monitor
      Manage Custom Reports
      .
    2. Add
      a report and give it a descriptive
      Name
      . In this example, the name is
      Log Intrazone-Default Rule-DC
      .
    3. Set the
      Database
      to
      Traffic Summary
      .
    4. Select the
      Scheduled
      box.
    5. 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.
    6. Set the desired
      Time Frame
      ,
      Sort By
      , and
      Group By
      values. In this example, the selected values are
      Threats
      and
      App Category
      , respectively.
    7. 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:
    8. Commit
      the changes.

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