Naturally, as we have watched the explosive and exponential growth of technology over the past several years, rapidly developing and accelerated by the volume of people now working from home, we have also seen enormous and worrying developments in the ransomware industry. For example, the Colonial Pipeline hack in the USA. It is now more obvious than ever before that cybersecurity must be taken seriously not just by organisations that are mainly digital, but every single organisation.
That’s why Microsoft has invested heavily in Azure Firewall and has provided organisations with all the necessary tools needed to sufficiently protect their cloud infrastructure and workloads. But what does it protect against? Ransomware is a deliberately harmful and malicious software used by hackers and designed to usually ‘encrypt’ data or block access to your computer systems until a sum of money is paid.
There are several ways Ransomware can be spread, often through links in emails which, when clicked, infect the computer systems with a virus, or websites which bypass the computers permission stipulation and download software onto its system, thus infecting the computer and potentially exposing vulnerable data. Ransomware is so dangerous as it can result in huge consequences for your business, such as potentially years’ worth of precious data being destroyed, customer data breaches which may result in law suits and hugely impeding productivity in your business.
This is where Azure Firewall comes in. Using its Intrusion Detection & Prevention System (IDPS), any amount of data entering your system is inspected thoroughly, including payloads, headers and more to identify harmful or suspicious data and prevent it from intruding on or penetrating your network. IDPS also allows you to track this data by monitoring your network for it, it allows you to log the details of it and report it and/or attempt to block it.
The IDPS signatures are applicable for both application and network level traffic (layers 4-7), contain over 65,00 different signatures in 50 different categories to keep up to date with the rapidly and ever-changing landscape and are fully managed for you. Azure Firewall gets early access to vulnerability information on Microsoft Active Protections Programme (MAPP) and Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). Along with this, Azure Firewall is releasing 30-50 new signatures each day.
Nowadays, modern encryption, such as Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) are used globally by a vast array of organisations to secure internet traffic and prevent the data from being compromised in any way. Because of this, hackers are using encryption to carry their malicious software into the victim network. Therefore, encrypted traffic must be inspected just like any other traffic.
Thankfully, Azure Firewall Premium IDPS allows attacks to be detected in all ports and protocols for unencrypted traffic. But when HTTPS traffic needs to be inspected Azure Firewall can use its Transport Layer Security (TLS) inspection capability which will allow the traffic to be decrypted and malicious/harmful malware to be detected.
With Azure, organisations can limit exposure to cyber-attacks and take comfort that their data is stored on the Azure cloud behind Enterprise grade infrastructure. Spanish Point can help simplify the process modernising applications on Azure with SMART AIM.
SMART AIM is Spanish Point’s end-to-end solution for optimising your journey with Azure. Whether that be through cost optimisation, our extensive security reviews, custom development or more specific areas you wish to address. SMART AIM allows experienced professionals at Spanish Point to help optimise your solution and to ensure they are to the highest standard possible. Furthermore, our security reviews will make sure your ISV is protected and secure to an extremely high standard.
If you think we could help you optimise your application, or have any further enquiries, contact us to find out more.
