How NGFW Capabilities Help Mitigate Cybersecurity Risks

While traditional firewalls only operate at layer 4 in the OSI model, NGFWs can inspect packet content at all stack layers, even down to the application level, enabling them to thwart modern Gen V cyberattacks.

This is made possible through deep packet inspection (DPI), which improves packet filtering by checking a packet’s body rather than just its header information.

Detection of Malware

Malware can penetrate a business’s network, steal data, damage reputation, and bring operations to a standstill. It’s critical that cyber threats are detected and stopped at the source.

Traditional firewalls only operate at layers 3 and 4. Still, NGFWs can work at Layer 7—the application layer—to identify applications, preventing malware from getting past the security perimeter and into the company’s internal networks, where it can wreak havoc. This ability to operate at the application layer sets NGFWs apart from their traditional counterparts.

One of the NGFW capabilities is that it can also reduce attack vectors by limiting the number of applications allowed on the network. A centralized access management feature enables admins to create a white list of trusted applications and block unauthorized ones from being downloaded. This helps prevent steganography tools from concealing malicious content in seemingly harmless files.

An NGFW with advanced malware detection capabilities is essential to protect against known and unknown threats, including zero-day attacks. The ability to detect malware at the network and device level and correlate this information with threat intelligence from sandboxing tools is critical for detecting and responding to cyberattacks in real time. This requires that NGFWs have DPI capabilities, which use analysis and signature comparison to determine whether or not packets contain suspicious contents.

Detection of Network Intrusions

NGFWs can detect cyberattacks lurking inside traffic, such as malware, DDoS attacks, etc. This is possible thanks to extensive capabilities, including advanced malware detection and integration with threat intelligence feeds, sandboxing, URL filtering, and more.

This is also made possible by NGFWs using stateful inspection to perform granular processing of network packets. They do so at multiple layers of the OSI model, including layer 7 (the application layer), which attackers commonly use to bypass security policies that only apply to layers 3 and 4.

Unlike traditional firewalls, NGFWs are designed to be scalable and secure, even in large networks with thousands of devices. They can be deployed as a physical firewall appliance, virtualized in the cloud, or as a software solution running on a third-party server called Firewall as a Service (FWaaS).

Moreover, they can protect branches and remote offices, data centers, private and public clouds, and even hybrid environments. Some NGFWs are physically installed on-premises, while others are hosted off-premises to minimize pressure on network resources and demand technical management. This allows them to be categorized as rugged firewalls, small and midsize enterprise firewalls, or hyperscale network security. 

Detection of Botnets

Most security technologies require significant processing power to inspect traffic for signs of cyberattacks and deliver protection. As a result, these tools quickly become a bottleneck. And integrating new necessary functionality like Advanced Threat Protection and sandboxing adds even more to the workload. This translates to lower performance. NGFWs, on the other hand, use multiple techniques to monitor all traffic in real-time and identify attacks based on behavior or threat signatures. These granular inspections typically use inline deep packet inspection, decryption, and post-decryption scanning.

Unlike traditional firewalls, which analyze network traffic at Layers 3 and 4, NGFWs process data at multiple layers of the OSI network stack. As a result, they can identify applications and detect malicious activity that might otherwise go undetected by regular firewalls. NGFWs also feature application awareness, which allows them to block or allow packets based on which application they are headed for. This is important because modern Gen V cyberattacks bypass layers 3 and 4 to access corporate systems.

To counter this, NGFWs should incorporate advanced malware detection capabilities such as IPS and anti-malware to identify known and unknown threats. These features are important because most current malware is crafted to avoid signature-based detection. They should also have sandboxing integration to enable rapid, on-the-fly malware analysis. This will help them prevent the spread of malware from one system to other devices in the network and reduce the number of undetected threats.

Detection of Denial-of-Service Attacks

NGFWs are well-positioned to detect and block threats before penetrating internal network perimeters. Unlike traditional firewalls, which only analyze traffic at layers 3 and 4, NGFWs can look deeper into a packet’s contents at layer 7 (the application layer).

This ability to inspect applications allows NGFWs to block or allow packets based on which application they are going to. This is a critical security feature because many cyberattacks are designed to bypass layers 3 and 4 protections by targeting the app layer.

NGFWs can also use deep packet inspection (DPI) to scan packet bodies for malware signatures. This capability is often called intrusion prevention, and most NGFWs include this as part of their DPI capabilities. However, modern malware can avoid signature detection by incorporating evasion techniques, so NGFWS must incorporate advanced threat protection capabilities, such as sandboxing and integration with threat intelligence feeds.

Because attackers are continually changing their attack methods, it’s essential that NGFWs can receive and act on continuous threat intelligence feeds. This enables them to leverage the latest indicators of compromise (IoCs) and dynamically update their IPS signatures to detect the latest attack patterns. In addition, NGFWs that integrate threat intelligence can perform advanced malware detection via sandboxing and other analysis technologies.