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Cybersecurity & Compliance

Firewall Audit

A rule-base review that finds overly permissive, redundant, and risky firewall rules — the misconfigurations that quietly widen your attack surface as rule-sets grow over years.

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Overview

Years of rule changes, one clean-up pass

Firewall rule-bases accumulate cruft. Over years of changes, temporary exceptions become permanent, overly broad 'any-any' rules slip in, and nobody remembers why half the rules exist — each one a potential hole. A firewall audit systematically reviews your rule-base to find and rank these problems. We look for overly permissive rules, unused and shadowed rules, risky services exposed more widely than necessary, and gaps between the rule-base and your intended segmentation policy. Where you have change-management records, we can check that rules trace back to an approved business need. The output is a cleaned-up, risk-ranked view of your rule-base: what to tighten, what to remove, and what to document — reducing attack surface and making future changes easier to reason about. This pairs naturally with a network security assessment for a full perimeter picture.

What’s included

  • Rule-base review for overly permissive and 'any-any' rules
  • Detection of unused, redundant, and shadowed rules
  • Exposure checks against intended segmentation policy
  • Change-justification review where records exist
  • Risk-ranked clean-up and documentation plan
Who it's for

Whose rule-base usually needs this

  • IT and network teams maintaining a firewall rule-base that has grown through years of changes and staff turnover.
  • Organisations that inherited network infrastructure through acquisition, outsourcing handover or a departing administrator.
  • Regulated businesses required to evidence periodic firewall rule review for auditors, insurers or enterprise customers.
  • Companies enforcing network segmentation who need to confirm the rule-base actually implements the intended policy.
When you need it

What tends to trigger a rule-base review

  • Temporary 'allow any' exceptions were added during an outage or migration and were never removed afterwards.
  • An auditor or customer asks for evidence of a periodic firewall configuration review and none has been performed.
  • A managed service provider or previous administrator handed over the estate with no documentation of why rules exist.
  • You implemented segmentation between environments and want independent confirmation that traffic cannot cross as intended.
  • Firewall performance and change management have degraded because the rule-base carries hundreds of stale entries.
Deliverables

What comes back after the review

Every engagement ends with something your team can act on — not a slide deck.

  • A risk-ranked findings report covering permissive, shadowed, redundant and unused rules.
  • A rule-by-rule disposition list marking what to tighten, remove, merge or document.
  • An analysis of exposure gaps between the live rule-base and your intended segmentation policy.
  • Observations on change-management and rule-justification hygiene where records are available.
  • A summary of firewall risk suitable for management reporting and audit evidence.
How it works

How the rule-by-rule review runs

The same predictable shape whether the work is an assessment or a build, so you always know what happens next.

  1. 1

    Discover

    We start by understanding your systems, goals, and constraints — scope, risk tolerance, and what success looks like — so the work is aimed at your actual problem, not a generic template.

  2. 2

    Assess or build

    For security work, we test and analyse against recognised standards. For development, we build in small, reviewable increments. Either way, you see progress early and can change direction.

  3. 3

    Report or ship

    You get clear, prioritised deliverables — a report your engineers can act on, or working software shipped to your environment — with the context to understand what was done and why.

  4. 4

    Support

    We stay available after delivery: retesting fixes, iterating on the product, and answering the questions that come up once real users and real traffic arrive.

FAQ

Firewall Audit — common questions

What do you need from us to run a firewall audit?

We need the configuration export from each firewall, your intended network and segmentation policy, and a network diagram if one exists. Read-only console access helps us check hit counts so we can identify genuinely unused rules. Where you keep change tickets, sharing them lets us check that rules trace back to an approved business need. Most of the analysis is offline, so disruption to your team is minimal.

Will the audit disrupt live traffic?

No. A firewall audit is an analysis of configuration, not an active test, so we do not send traffic through your firewalls or change any rules. Everything we do is read-only. We deliver recommendations for you to implement through your own change-management process, and we can help you sequence removals so that low-risk clean-up happens first and rules with uncertain business use are staged for observation rather than deleted outright.

How is this different from a network penetration test?

A firewall audit reviews the rule-base from the inside to see what is permitted; a penetration test probes from the outside to see what is reachable and exploitable. The audit finds rules that are dangerous but not currently being exploited, which testing alone can miss, and it explains why exposure exists. The two complement each other, and many clients pair a firewall audit with a network security assessment for a complete perimeter picture.

Which firewall vendors do you review?

We review the major enterprise and cloud platforms, including modern threat-aware appliances and cloud-native controls such as security groups and network ACLs. The methodology is vendor-independent: permissive rules, shadowing, redundancy, unused entries and segmentation gaps appear in every rule-base regardless of who made the device. Tell us what you run and we will confirm coverage before we scope the engagement.
Related services

Complete the perimeter picture with

Teams that come to Safe Tech AI for firewall audit frequently need these too.

  • Network Security Assessment

    A review of your internal and external network posture — exposed services, segmentation, and misconfigurations — so you know exactly what is reachable, from where, and what to close down first.

    Learn more

  • Web Application Firewall (WAF) Setup

    Deployment and tuning of Web Application Firewall rules for your production apps — protection that blocks real attacks without breaking legitimate traffic or drowning you in false positives.

    Learn more

  • Endpoint Security Assessment

    A review of device-level controls, hardening, and detection coverage across laptops, servers, and workstations — the endpoints where attacks most often land and where good defaults matter most.

    Learn more

Your rule-base has years of history you can't see.

Send us the configuration exports and we'll return a risk-ranked list of what to tighten, remove, or document before it becomes an incident.

Request a firewall audit