Corporate firewalls typically include a massive number of rules, which accumulate over time as new workloads are added. When rules stack up piecemeal like this, misconfigurations occur that, at best, create headaches for security administrators, and at worst, create vulnerabilities that lead to security breaches.  

To address this, we have introduced the Firewall Insights module in our Network Intelligence Center, which provides a single console for managing Google Cloud network visibility, monitoring and troubleshooting. 

What are Firewall insights?

Historically, there hasn’t been an easy way to deal with the accumulation of complicated firewall rules. That was until we created Firewall Insights, which provides metrics reports and insight reports. These two reports contain information about firewall usage and the impact of various firewall rules on your VPC network. Even better, these insights and metrics are integrated into your Google Cloud Console for the VPC firewall and are also available via APIs.

You can use metrics reports to verify that firewall rules are being used appropriately and as intended. This report can uncover leftover rules from the past that are not actively used, review that the firewall rules allow or deny what is intended, perform live debugging of connections dropped, and leverage Cloud Monitoring to discover malicious attempts to access your network. 

You can use insight reports to identify firewall misconfigurations, detect security attacks, and optimize and tighten your security rules.

Let’s take a look at how these reports work.

Metrics Report, a deeper dive

Metrics insights analyzes your VPC firewalls usage by tracking metrics such as firewall hit counts and last used.  Let’s check this out with an example:

When you navigate to your VPC network and click on Firewall, ensure that you have selected Logs, Hit count and also Last hit in the column display options:

After this is enabled, now you should be able to see your VPC firewall rules with the hit count and last hit metrics. In the image below you can see that if logs are not enabled for rules, hit count and last hit metrics will not be collected. If logs are enabled, these details are collected, and shown in the VPC firewalls console.

As you can see in Figure 1.2, each firewall rule which has logging enabled will show hit counts, so based on the example above, the rule “uc1-db4-deny-http”  has been hit 109,154 times, the last time being 2021-03-10 (13:10:00). If you want to dive even deeper, you can click on the hit count and this will bring you to the logs viewer page where you can expand these logs and analyze all the details:

In order to enable logs for a particular firewall rule, you can edit it and turn logs on. By default, metadata is added in firewall logs. If you want to reduce the log size, you can do so by excluding these additional fields. Excluding these metadata fields will not impact the functionality of Firewall Insights.

From the “Firewall” page, you can also multi-select a group of firewall rules and turn on all logs at once.

Firewall rule usage metrics are accurate only for the period of time during which Firewall Rules Logging is enabled.

Insights Report, a deeper dive

Insights Report provides an intelligent analysis of the configuration of your firewalls. A report can contain one or more insights. 

We will see examples now about the different insight reports which include:

• Shadowed firewall rules
• Allow rules with no hit in the last six weeks
• Deny rules with hits in the last 24 hours

By definition, a shadowed rule is a VPC firewall rule that is completely overshadowed by one or more firewall rules with higher or equal priority. We call that shadowing rules. Let’s see an example on how to find shadowed rules:Let’s say that you try to use ping between two VMs but it fails. Let’s take a look at the firewall rules applied to the VM:

If we look closely, we can see that there are two rules with the same target tag, and those are almost identical except their source IP range. The IP range of the deny rule “uc1-app2-deny-all” includes the IP range of the rule allow “uc1-app2-allow-app1”. Therefore, we can see that “uc1-app2-allow-app1” is shadowed by “uc1-app2-deny-all”, and the ping between these VMs failed due to that.

To avoid such incidents in the future, Firewall Insights provides you with a convenient list of rules overshadowed by other firewall rules.

To see shadowed rules, you can click on the column selector, and add “Insights” to the firewall and route details:

Once this is applied, you will be able to see shadowed rules here:

Alternatively, you can navigate to Network Intelligence > Firewall Insights, where we will see the shadowed rule report:

If we click on the insight we will get more details:

Going back to the firewall insights card (Figure 1.8), we can also identify that “uc1-db4-allow-app3” is shadowed by a combination of two rules and if we clicked on the insight this would provide all the details.

From the Firewall Insights dashboard, let’s move on to “allow rules with no hit”, where we can see firewall rules that have not logged any hits in the past six weeks. Such rules could be as a result of a misconfiguration, or leftover rules from past deployments. Tighten your security boundaries by identifying and removing such rules. If we go back to Network Intelligence > Firewall Insights, we can see allow rules with no hit:

We can drill down to view the full list of rules with no hit. We can see, for instance, one of the rules, the bottom one “uc2-app1-allow-internet”, might be a leftover rule to allow internet access from a past deployment, which means it has little likelihood of being hit in the future. So you may want to consider removing it from the rule set:

Click on the firewall rule to review all the details, and take a look at the prediction, which is made based on the hit pattern that we saw for similar rules in the same organization:

Let’s go back to the Firewall Insights dashboard and move on to the last category, “deny rules with hits in the last 24 hours”, which help you capture the traffic blocked by deny rules. These traffic types could indicate external attacks into your VPC network, or compromised VM instances attempting to send traffic out of your network. Let’s examine future hit prediction on a firewall rule. Navigate to Network Intelligence > Firewall Insights and take a look at the deny rules with hits card:

If your click on the “uc4-web-deny-web” rule, you can see the hit count monitoring, and if you click on the hit number we can dive deeper in the logs:

These tips should help you effectively leverage Firewall Insights to gain better control over a massive firewall rule set. Automate shadowed rule detection, quickly troubleshoot misconfigured rules, effortlessly pinpoint the overgranting rules hidden in the rule set, and identify the failed attempts to break into your network that were rejected by your firewall rules. 

To learn more about Firewall Insights, please refer to our documentation. Additionally, to see how we’re advancing intelligent automation in network security, check our recent blog post.

Enterprises are increasingly seeking out technologies that help them create unique experiences for customers with speed and at scale. At the same time, customers want flexibility when deciding where to manage their enterprise data, particularly when it comes to business-critical applications.

That’s why I’m thrilled that Sprinklr, the unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform for modern enterprises, has partnered with Google Cloud to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and grow awareness among our joint customers. Sprinklr will work closely with our global salesforce, benefitting from our deep relationships with enterprises that have chosen to build on Google Cloud. 

Akin to Google Cloud’s mission to accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform their business through data-powered innovation, Sprinklr’s primary objective is to empower the world’s largest and most loved brands to make their customers happier by listening, learning, and taking action through insights. With this strategic partnership now in place, Sprinklr and Google Cloud will go-to-market together with the end-customer as our sole focus.

Traditionally, brands have adopted point solutions to manage segments of the customer journey. In isolation, these may work — but they rarely work collaboratively, even when vendors build “Frankenstacks” of disconnected products. These solutions can’t deliver a 360° view of the customer, and often reinforce departmental silos. All of which creates point-solution chaos.

Sprinklr’s approach is fundamentally different and is the way out of the aforementioned point-solution chaos. As the first platform purpose-built for unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) and trusted by the enterprise, Sprinklr’s industry-leading AI and powerful Care, Marketing, Research, and Engagement solutions enable the world’s top brands to learn about their customers, understand the marketplace, and reach, engage, and serve customers on all channels to drive business growth. 

Sprinklr was built from the ground up as a platform-first solution, designed to evolve and grow with the rapid expansion of digital channels and applications. The results? Faster innovation. Stronger performance. And a future-proof strategy for customer engagement on an enterprise scale.

“Sprinklr works with large, global companies that want flexibility when deciding where to manage their enterprise data and consider our platform a business-critical application,” said Doug Balut, Senior Vice President of Global Alliances, Sprinklr. “Giving our customers the opportunity to manage Sprinklr on Google Cloud empowers them to create engaging customer experiences while maintaining the high security, scalability, and performance they need to run their business.”

To learn more about this exciting partnership and the challenges we jointly solve for customers, check out the recent conversation between Google Cloud’s VP of Marketing, Sarah Kennedy, and Sprinklr’s Chief Experience Officer, Grad Conn. Or read the press release on the partnership.

The pandemic continues to deeply affect our lives around the globe. In some places, new cases are surging and returning to work is the last thing on people’s minds. In other areas, conditions are improving and companies are starting to think about transitioning their workforce back to the office. 

Exactly when and how to do this remains complex and varies by country, industry, and company.  What’s certain is that hybrid work will become an essential part of the business world moving forward. And finding solutions that bridge the gap between “in-person” and “somewhere else” are crucial.  

At Google, we’ve been focused on what the hybrid transformation means for us. To prepare for hybrid work, using modern solutions is a key enabler.

Chrome OS: Supporting Google’s return to office strategy 

At Google, we’ll move to a hybrid work week where most Googlers spend approximately three days in the office and two days wherever they work best. It’s no surprise that as the modern, secure, cloud-first platform, Chrome OS is playing a key role in our transition to a hybrid work model. Because Chrome OS devices can easily be shared, more flexible working models and spaces are now possible. And with user profiles stored in the cloud and collaboration solutions like Google Workspace, employees can log in to any Chrome OS device, access what they need and pick up where they left off.

Here are just a few ways we are using Chrome OS and its tools to support the return to the office:

• In select office locations, Googlers can reserve desks through an internal booking tool set up with a high-performance Chromebox, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Employees can log in to the Chromebox which syncs their cloud profile, and start working with the same environment they have on all their Chrome OS devices.
• We’re announcing new docking stations that are designed for Chrome OS devices and allow employees to bring in their Chromebook from home, connect to the dock with one USB-C cable, and use a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for a full desktop experience. 
• Every Chrome OS device enables a zero-trust security working model with BeyondCorp Enterprise providing our workforce with simple and secure access to applications while providing additional security controls for IT.
• We’ve deployed the new Chrome OS Readiness Tool to our extended workforce to identify employees that are able to switch to Chrome OS. This allows us to expand the latest security, deployment, and manageability benefits to more of the workforce.

Additional ways Chrome OS is helping organizations with return to office

We aren’t the only ones supporting our return to office and hybrid work strategy with Chrome OS. We’ve heard more ways our customers are using Chrome OS to make the transition as smooth as possible. These include:

• Streamlining deployment and management of Chrome OS devices using zero-touch enrollment which allows devices to automatically enroll into a corporate domain without IT configuration.
  Grab & Go Chromebooks being used for frontline and hybrid information workers, allowing employees to grab a Chromebook from a cart and get to work right away.
• Parallels Desktop for Chrome OS being deployed to allow employees to access Windows or legacy apps locally on their Chrome OS devices.
• Existing Windows and Mac devices being modernized and repurposed to run a Chrome OS experience using CloudReady. (Google is currently offering a CloudReady promotion. Learn more here.)

While the Chrome OS team has been working towards making remote working as seamless as possible for IT, we’ve also made advancements in supporting traditional technology that’s required in the office.

• In October, we announced Chrome Enterprise Recommended: a collection of identity, printing, productivity, communications, and virtualization solutions that are verified to run great on Chrome OS.
• With the increased usage of video conferencing on Chrome OS devices, we’ve made improvements to Google Meet and Zoom performance including camera and video improvements to reduce any unnecessary processing and features that intelligently adapt to your device, your network, and what you are working on.
• For improved access to Windows and legacy apps, VMware Horizon introduced multi-monitor support and USB redirection and Citrix Workspace released a tech preview with webcam enhancements and Microsoft Teams optimizations. 
• We integrated with the Okta Workflows platform, so IT administrators can include Chrome OS in it’s access logic and deploy quickly without code. Recently, we’ve added the ability to require users to reauthenticate on their Chrome OS device once Okta has detected that the user has changed their password. Try out this new capability by signing up for our Trusted Tester program.
• We’ve increased our support for direct IP printing with additional printer models since the beginning of 2020. In addition, we have made improvements to management features, including support for multiple print servers and launched policy APIs to provide a better IT admin experience. 

Join us for a digital event with Modern Computing Alliance and its newest member HP 

Last year we announced the launch of the Modern Computing Alliance—a collaboration of industry leaders including Box, Chrome Enterprise, Citrix, Dell, Google Workspace, Imprivata, Intel, Okta, RingCentral, Slack, VMware, and Zoom aim to create the pioneering solutions that businesses need. We are thrilled to introduce HP, who brings their innovative hardware and enterprise hardware expertise to the Modern Computing Alliance and has been working closely with the alliance to ensure true silicon-to-cloud innovation.

As an alliance, we’ve been deeply engaged in the hybrid work shift. We invite you to join us for a digital event where we discuss questions about returning to work. Like how product design can encourage participation and collaboration regardless of where employees are, important security issues to keep in mind, and what factors businesses should consider to support a safe, working environment.

Home. Heading back. Hybrid.
Hear from the experts on hybrid work and return to office.
Date: May 20th, 2021

Register here. 

If you are ready to try Chrome OS today, it’s easy to get started. You can contact us to get connected to a partner, sign up for a free 30-day trial of Chrome Enterprise Upgrade to start managing Chrome OS devices, or deploy the Chrome OS Readiness Tool to identify employees that are ready to switch to Chrome OS.POSTED IN:

• CHROME ENTERPRISE
• PRODUCTIVITY & COLLABORATION
• RETURN TO OFFICE

When technology just works, it’s easy to trust. But too often, we place our trust in technology that doesn’t deserve it. When we do this with technology to provide healthcare, we put the safety of patients and the security and reliability of our global healthcare system at risk.

The institutions that make up our global healthcare system also place their trust in cybersecurity measures and technology to keep their systems running and repelling the unceasing wave of attacks they face. We often hear about the institutions that succumb to cyberattacks, but we don’t read much about the institutions that have been successful at defending their digital perimeter, and ultimately protected their ability to treat and protect patients.

Why were some institutions successful and others not as much? What cybersecurity capabilities made the healthcare institution resilient from these attacks? As we covered in our previous post on how healthcare can strengthen its cybersecurity resilience, establishing visibility and antifragility practices are necessary to repel attackers and build trust in the security and reliability of the technology our global healthcare system relies on.

As we continue our series on healthcare and cybersecurity, we’ll focus next on establishing sustainable visibility mechanisms so cybersecurity teams working in our global healthcare system can secure and preserve patient care and safety.

Visibility is akin to a patient taking 20 different medications but their doctor only knows about 10 of them. That’s the current state of many healthcare organizations’ relationship to the technology used on their networks and systems: They aren’t always aware of what technology is in use, whether it has vulnerabilities, how serious those vulnerabilities are, or how one weakness could lead to another or cascade out of control.

Visibility maps those technology assets (including the software, hardware, configurations, protections, who built it, and where the component parts come from) and help prioritize the importance of those assets in keeping systems and networks secure, no matter how complex the healthcare organization’s use of technology might be.

Building effective visibility

Building visibility into technology assets requires a structured approach. As mentioned in the first blog in this series, using a guide like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) provides an important mental model we can use to get a clear picture of the strengths and weaknesses of an organization’s cybersecurity risk profile, and how it applies to the assets the organization seeks to protect.

Cybersecurity author and leader Sounil Yu’s book Cyber Defense Matrix provides an important interpretation of the NIST CSF framework that can help us better understand what visibility we have into technology assets and how they are protected. Visibility is about more than just seeing all assets we have all at once. It’s also about understanding which assets are mission-critical and must be protected at all costs versus which ones are perhaps important but less crucial overall. Without the right balance, we end up trying to protect everything while not protecting what matters enough. This is where structural awareness comes in.

Structural awareness, or the conscious understanding and state of an organization’s assets, is established as one implements controls captured in the NIST CSF functions Identify and Protect. These controls focus on identifying assets, their bill of materials, their creators, their dependencies on other assets, the protections and vulnerabilities they have, and the threats they face. While visibility helps create an accurate map of technology assets, structural awareness builds on that visibility and answers questions such as, “What are the ways the threat actor could compromise that asset? What could be lost? How would it most likely happen? Would I know?”

Yu says that structural awareness is efficiently achieved with the help of automation, and is not as people-intensive as many practitioners, decision-makers, and executives might think. If a cyberattack is like an explosion, cybersecurity teams’ structural awareness helps them understand how the explosion could happen before (or ‘left of’) it goes ‘boom’.

It’s also important to remember that while structural awareness is related to situational awareness in some ways, they are different concepts. Situational awareness refers to mechanisms that are used to detect and respond to an event. Structural awareness mechanisms are ‘left of boom,’ or mechanisms that protect your assets so that events don’t happen. The goal is to stay ‘left of boom’ and avoid being ‘right of boom’. Being proactive in your protections and being ready to respond in either case is really important, nonetheless.

Thinking about assets in terms of users, devices, networks, applications and workloads and data (asset classes), and adopting mechanisms to discover assets of each type through visibility controls suggested by the NIST CSF, will lead to developing structural awareness. Structural awareness can help avoid the boom, but if the boom does happen, it can also help shape the situational awareness needed to react. The Cyber Defense Matrix is an ongoing project, and you can read more about it (and contribute to it) here.

Framing asset discovery for resilience

Cybersecurity teams must map out their organizations’ most critical healthcare services and systems that support them, but that’s easier said than done. Asset discovery can feel overwhelming. Trying to find, count, and audit the hardware, software, users, and data down to the component across even a small part of one’s technology footprint can feel like pushing a dead car up a steep hill. The way to make this easier is to prioritize this effort in the parts of the business where the impact of a quality or safety issue has the potential to create the most harm to the organization and those who depend on it.

A smart place to begin the process to find and evaluate the measurements that an institution uses to monitor those processes.

Healthcare providers: Start with the quality and safety measurements which must be submitted to various regulatory agencies in order to maintain licenses to operate.

• Health insurers: Look at the performance improvement metrics used to ensure subscriber benefits, quality requirements, and legal mandates are being met.
• Health IT services: Use service level agreements for measuring contract compliance with things like uptime, recovery time and point objectives, and response turnarounds.
• Life sciences organizations: Begin with the relevant Good Practice definitions and the metrics used to monitor quality and safety levels of products and services.

When analyzing the types of technology unique to healthcare – like network-connected medical devices such as infusion pumps, implantable pacemakers, ventilators, EKG equipment, and MRI machines – it’s important to ask what are the immediate safety hazards if there was a cyberattack. Not sure how to answer that question? The International Medical Device Regulators Forum produced a risk categorization model that could be helpful in framing that response. Operational technology, like blood bank and sample refrigerators, climate control, air handling, infection control and pneumatic tube systems, may also be used to identify and prioritize inventory efforts.

Once priorities have been set, teams can begin gathering data on critical services, the owners of those services, the systems those owners rely on, and the technology itself.

Inventory tactics on Google Cloud

Building service-technology mapping is not a one-time exercise. Organizations should take the time to automate inventory creation and maintenance, so they can maintain an up-to-date view of all the items in their environment at any given time. This is especially for organizations that have highly dynamic environments.

Google Cloud provides best practices on discovering and cataloging assets in its Cloud Architecture Center. Implement controls found in the Identity and Protect categories using the NIST Framework & Google Cloud technical paper. Automation is your friend when building and maintaining a complete and accurate inventory. Google Cloud Asset Inventory and Security Command Center can be used to inventory a variety of resources running in Google Cloud. Cloud Build, Google Cloud’s CI/CD platform, implements SLSA 1 and provides a trustworthy audit of software artifacts deployed through a managed pipeline. Cloud DLP inventories and labels data stored on Google Cloud Storage and services like BigQuery.

Meanwhile, a number of Google Cloud Marketplace partners have solutions that can help build a comprehensive inventory, and innovation continues to improve our technological options. One emerging field of security technology, called attack surface management, helps discover previously-unknown assets. Finally, our next blog on resilience discusses how to use a software bill of materials (also known by the breezy acronym SBOM) to gain visibility and structural awareness into applications.

It’s important to remember that when starting down this path, the goal is not to gain 100% visibility into every single component on every single device attached to every network supporting every service running. Success or failure is not achieved when the inventory process has reached an arbitrarily-determined ‘percentage complete.’ We want to prioritize expanding visibility and developing structural awareness on assets where safety and quality are at risk, so we can improve their resilience.

And finally, we feel it’s important to emphasize that in the past, healthcare industries have focused mainly on protecting the confidentiality of data. While that’s important, we must evolve security programs beyond protecting confidentiality as its primary (and some cases, only) focus.

To be resilient, we must design and build cybersecurity capabilities that deliver safety, integrity, and availability of the technology that cares for patients directly. As we gain visibility into the technology we depend on to keep us healthy, we improve our understanding about which parts of it we can trust, and which parts we can’t. Improving visibility is an important early step on our path to resilience.

At Google Cloud, we are committed to advancing invisible security and democratizing security operations for every organization. Today, we’re proud to share the next step in this journey with the acquisition of Siemplify, a leading security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) provider. Siemplify shares our vision in this space, and will join Google Cloud’s security team to help companies better manage their threat response.

In a time when cyberattacks are rapidly growing in both frequency and sophistication, there’s never been a better time to bring these two companies together. We both share the belief that security analysts need to be able to solve more incidents with greater complexity while requiring less effort and less specialized knowledge. With Siemplify, we will change the rules on how organizations hunt, detect, and respond to threats.

Providing a proven SOAR capability unified with Chronicle’s innovative approach to security analytics is an important step forward in our vision. Building an intuitive, efficient security operations workflow around planet-scale security telemetry will further realize Google Cloud’s vision of a modern threat management stack that empowers customers to go beyond typical security event and information management (SIEM) and extended detection and response (XDR) tooling, enabling better detection and response at the speed and scale of modern environments. 

“We’re excited to join Google Cloud and build on the success we’ve had in the market helping companies address growing security threats,” said Amos Stern, CEO at Siemplify. “Together with Chronicle’s rich security analytics and threat intelligence, we can truly help security professionals transform the security operations center to defend against today’s threats.”

The Siemplify platform is an intuitive workbench that enables security teams to both manage risk better and reduce the cost of addressing threats. Siemplify allows Security Operation Center analysts to manage their operations from end-to-end, respond to cyber threats with speed and precision, and get smarter with every analyst interaction. The technology also helps improve SOC performance by reducing caseloads, raising analyst productivity, and creating better visibility across workflows.

We plan to invest in SOAR capabilities with Siemplify’s cloud services as our foundation and the team’s talent leading the way. Our intention is to integrate Siemplify’s capabilities into Chronicle in ways that help enterprises modernize and automate their security operations. 

We’re looking forward to welcoming the Siemplify team to Google Cloud and working with them to help security operations teams accomplish so much more in defense of their organizations. You can read Siemplify CEO Amos Stern’s blog for more on this exciting news.