hello welcome to final management 201 I
professor wool and today we're going to
be talking about the challenges of
managing the security of your routers so
you may be wondering why are we talking
about routers in a firewall class well
robbers are firewalls every modern
router has 15 capabilities and it's able
to filter traffic just like a firewall
using what are known as access control
lists or ACLs each of those is a rule
base the difference is that robbers
often have much inferior management
systems to control and manage all of
these policies so where are you using
your your routers to filter traffic
there are several scenarios you can have
in mind the first is if you have many
remote offices like different stores
maybe each one of those remote locations
has a router that is filtering traffic
and protecting the network inside the
remote office or the store so those
routers are functioning as your
firewalls if you look inside corporate
headquarters which is zoomed in over
here on the right you can see that
behind the corporate firewall there are
many many routers that are segregating
different parts of the network and
separating them from each other so you
have different business units and
business functions that need to
communicate and those routers are
enforcing the policy allowing or
blocking traffic from various points to
various other points with this in mind
now think about what you need to do when
you're introducing a new security change
you need to now allow traffic from point
A to point B and it has to go through
the network so obviously you need to
make changes to the firewall over here
protecting the resource but you also
need to look at the routers along the
path we need to find them to discover
which routers are relevant and then you
need to make sure that the traffic from
two points a and B Islam so when you're
making a change to the security policy
and you're touching these routers you
really need to do two things you need to
modify or check their routing just to
make sure that traffic actually is sent
for us first rather than the second
driver to the firewall to the device you
need to reach so you need to make sure
that the routing is done correctly and
then you need to make sure that the
access lists on these devices over here
and over here and of course on this
firewall are allowing the traffic that
you need to allow if you don't make the
changes in the firewall and also in the
routers traffic will not go through so
you need to identify and correct both
the routing and the security policy this
goes the other way as well imagine
somebody makes it change an unauthorized
change to one of these devices either to
the routing policy or to the security
policy and that ACLs on these devices
you will have a network outage so you
need to have control over these devices
from security perspective both on the
routing and on the ACL to have a good
control over your network in general and
the final aspect of this is that since
these routers these filter browsers are
part of your security infrastructure
they are subject to audit so if you have
a PCI audit these devices that protect
your stores are part of the PCI audit
because they are protecting your areas
where you're storing credit card
information so you need to be able to
control them and demonstrate to the
auditor that you are monitoring them
properly so what does it take away from
all of this you need to remember that
your routers are also firewalls you need
to and and you need to treat them that
way you need to monitor them for changes
you need to consider them when you're
making security changes to the network
and you need to audit them properly and
finally sometimes these routers become
very bloated in terms of policy they
have thousands of access
on them and they become difficult to
manage and slow things down and it might
be a good idea to clean them up
occasionally and get rid of the clutter
that's what we have today thank you for
your attention
