Try to avoid these security holes your firewall can’t see

A coworker opening a suspicious link, a laptop sending files at midnight, tiny errors with huge consequences.

Your firewall is humming along perfectly. And your network is still bleeding. That's the uncomfortable truth most IT managers refuse to acknowledge. Firewalls accomplish their mission brilliantly, they strangle unauthorized traffic and stand sentinel at your network perimeter. But they can't perceive everything. Certain threats glide right past them, invisible and relentless. Could Network Monitoring be the missing eyes your network desperately needs?

The Insider Who Isn't Even Trying

Everyone fixates on hackers smashing in from the outside. Nobody considers Sarah from accounting.

She's just clicking links in emails that appear legitimate or recycling the same password across twelve different platforms.

Your firewall trusts internal traffic. It must. That trust morphs into a superhighway for threats once credentials get pillaged. The firewall waves it through without hesitation.

Encrypted Traffic Lurking in Plain Sight

Most web traffic is now encrypted. Wonderful for privacy. Disastrous for visibility.

Attackers conceal malicious payloads inside encrypted channels that your firewall can't scrutinize. Your network might be hemorrhaging data right now through these channels:

• Command and control communications masquerading as HTTPS traffic
• Data exfiltration through encrypted tunnels
• Malware downloads mimicking software updates
• Phishing sites brandishing valid SSL certificates
• Cryptocurrency mining hidden in encrypted sessions

You need tools that can dissect encrypted traffic. Most organizations don't possess them.

The Shadow IT Catastrophe

Your employees are operating their own tech stack. Cloud storage accounts. Collaboration tools. Project management software.

They're deploying these services because they make work easier. Nobody solicited permission. Your firewall detects cloud traffic and shrugs.

But every unauthorized application is a potential entry point. Every unmonitored service represents a location where data might be trickling out. How can you safeguard what you can't see?

Lateral Movement After the Breach

Imagine this: an attacker penetrates your perimeter defenses.

Now what?

Once something's nestled inside your network, migrating laterally between systems resembles normal internal traffic. The attacker pivots from one compromised machine to another, plundering sensitive data like a thief who's already bypassed the locks.

Firewalls don't surveil internal traffic with the same ferocity. That's not their design purpose.

APIs and Microservices

Modern applications are distributed. Atomized. They converse with dozens of services simultaneously through APIs that your firewall barely comprehends.

An attacker exploiting an API vulnerability doesn't need to breach your firewall. They just transmit malformed requests to an exposed endpoint.

The firewall never blinks!

What Actually Functions?

Stop conceptualizing security as a wall around your castle.

Start envisioning it as perpetual vigilance across every stratum. Network monitoring from sources like KRS IT Consulting scrutinizes internal traffic patterns. Behavior analysis that identifies anomalies your firewall would miss entirely.

Your firewall is essential. Indispensable. But it's not sufficient anymore, and pretending otherwise is the biggest security hole of all.

Juan Bendana is a full time freelance writer who deals in writing with various niches like technology, Pest Control, food, health, business development, and more.