What is Network Hardening?
After gaining initial access to a network, cyber attackers often move laterally towards their targets. To make this more difficult, organizations need to make some changes to their network architecture, including the active use of network segmentation. This is known as network hardening.
As part of our network hardening services, we first take a snapshot of the existing network architecture and then provide recommendations on how segmentation can be implemented. Additionally, during the analysis, we examine VPN usage and firewall policies within the organization and offer suggestions on necessary hardening steps.
The ADEO network hardening service is designed to analyze and report on how organizations' network infrastructures can be reconfigured to minimize the impact of potential cyber attacks.
Why should Network Segmentation be done?
Network segmentation is an architectural approach that divides a network into multiple segments or subnets, with each acting as a small network in its own right. This allows network administrators to control the flow of traffic between subnets based on detailed policies. Organizations use segmentation to improve monitoring, enhance performance, isolate technical issues, and most importantly, enhance security.
Network segmentation provides network security professionals with a powerful tool to prevent unauthorized access to personal information, corporate financial records, and highly confidential intellectual property by malicious insiders or external attackers. These assets are often located in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, such as public and private clouds, and software-defined networks (SDNs) that require security measures to be in place to prevent cyber attacks.
What are the Benefits of Network Segmentation?
The primary advantage of network segmentation is increased security. A large network without segmentation represents a large attack surface. However, when this large network is divided into smaller subnets, isolating network traffic within subnets reduces the attack surface and prevents lateral movement. Thus, even if a component on the network or the network itself is compromised, the subnet segments can prevent attackers from moving laterally across the network.
Segmentation is also an effective way to isolate an active attack before it spreads across the network. Segmentation ensures that malware in one segment does not affect systems in other segments. Therefore, creating segments limits the speed at which the attack can spread and minimizes the attack surface, which helps prevent the escalation of a cyber attack.
In addition to improving security, segmentation can also reduce network congestion and enhance network performance by eliminating unnecessary traffic in a particular segment. For instance, medical devices in a hospital can be located in different segments from the visitor network to prevent them from being affected by guest web browsing traffic. Consequently, network segmentation minimizes local traffic per subnet by having fewer systems per subnet and allows external traffic to be limited to only those designated for the subnet.
Example Scenarios for Network Segmentation
Organizations can use network segmentation for a variety of applications, including:
Wireless Guest Network
By using network segmentation, a company can provide a less risky Wi-Fi connectivity service to visitors and contractors. When a guest logs in with their credentials, they enter a micro-segment that only serves to provide access to the internet and has no other functions.
User Group Access
To protect against data breaches from internal users, many organizations place individual departments on separate subnets and strictly control access between these subnets. For instance, an attempt to access the human resources group from the engineering group is considered an action that requires detailed examination.
Public Cloud Security
In general, cloud service providers are responsible for security in the cloud infrastructure. However, customers are also responsible for the security of operating systems, platforms, access control, data, intellectual property, source code, and customer-facing content. Segmentation is an effective method to isolate applications in public and hybrid cloud environments, helping to reduce the risk of cyber attacks on critical assets.
