This is effective as long as malicious traffic originates outside a network and is caught before entering. However, this offers little to no protection against malicious insiders or successful outside attackers. When a network is unsegmented, it has a flat internal architecture that enables users to easily move laterally across resources. This same structure can be abused by attackers.
When a network is segmented, however, it creates internal barriers in addition to external ones. These barriers help restrict the damage that can be caused by successful attacks no matter where an attack originates. Improves monitoring A segmented network requires the ability to control and filter traffic. By nature, this leads to better monitoring since you can see all traffic moving between segments or services. It also gives you better insight as to how services and users are connecting to your various resources.
Improves performance In a segmented network topology, there are fewer hosts per subnet and thus less local traffic. Broadcast traffic can be isolated to the local subnet. This reduces network congestion and improves capacity with existing resources. Increases data security With network segmentation, you have a greater ability to customize system protections. You can use segmentation to layer assets based on priority. For example, placing critical assets behind greater protections while leaving less critical assets more accessible is one approach.
When you stack protections and strategically focus your efforts, you are better able to protect your most valuable and most likely to be targeted data. Security benefits of segmentation include:. Protection from adversary attacks Being able to limit attacker movement is the primary benefit of network segmentation. With segmentation, if an attacker manages to breach your network, they only gain access to the specific segment they breached.
To reach other assets, attackers must breach additional barriers. This takes time and creates additional opportunities for your detection systems to recognize, alert to and block attack activity.
The longer it takes an attacker to reach your assets, the better your chances are to prevent or reduce damage. Network segmentation is not complete security, but it makes it much more difficult for adversaries to reach your most important assets. Network segmentation can help increase the security of any network but there are a few specific use cases for which it is often implemented. Guest wireless network Frequently, organizations want to offer guest networks for clients or contractors, rather than allowing access to their main network.
Network segmentation enables you to accomplish this while restricting access to wider resources. For example, guests may be given credentials that only provide access to Internet resources rather than internal.
User group access Within your network, you likely have data or services that are department-specific. Network segmentation lets you restrict access to these services and data to only those departments or users that need it. For example, developers need access to codebases and testing environments but not to HR resources or employee records. With segmentation, you can directly block access or trigger alerts for suspicious access.
Public cloud security If you are using public cloud services you may be familiar with the concept of shared responsibility for security. The shared responsibility model typically requires cloud users to manage their own security around applications, data and system access. However, cloud engineers and support still need at least some access to your resources and data.
Network segmentation allows you to achieve this protection more consistently, by more finely controlling who specifically has access. Regulatory compliance Network segmentation can help you ensure regulatory compliance by applying necessary controls to affected data.
For example, if you need to collect credit card information, you can segregate where the data is stored and exactly who can access it. This lets you meet PCI compliance without requiring the heavier necessary restrictions across your network. Network segmentation can provide significant benefits but it can also be a challenge to implement correctly. Below are a few of the most common challenges. Network segmentation enables organizations to gain greater control over their systems but can quickly lead to micromanagement.
This can happen if you try to segment every aspect of your network or are unsure how or where to start. Highly granular segmentation, or nano-segmentation, creates more work for security and operations teams without producing significant additional benefits.
It requires more network barriers and is more likely to create bottlenecks for users. Additionally, trying to segment your entire network in one go requires more upfront planning and can create the need to redo work. Failure to respond to alerts Segmenting a network creates many more channels for alerts and audits but can also lead to information overload. If security teams are suddenly receiving even twice as many alerts as before, incidents are likely to be missed or ignored.
This is problematic for obvious reasons; a segmented network is only useful if it increases security. For segmentation to work, you need to incorporate tooling and solutions that help you process and manage additional traffic data.
This often means adopting systems with configurable automated responses. It also involves using solutions that centralize data, eliminating the need to individually monitor segments. How to further improve the security of network segmentation After your network is segmented, it can be tempting to assume that your configuration is good and to move on. However, assets, users and access methods change. For example, web servers and email servers need to be Internet facing.
Because they face the internet, these servers are the most vulnerable to attack so should be separated from servers that do not need direct Internet access.
By keeping these servers in separate zones, you can minimize the damage if one of your Internet facing servers is compromised. In the diagram above, the allowed direction of traffic is indicated with the red arrows. The proxy, email, and web servers have been placed in a separate DMZ to the application and database servers for maximum protection.
Traffic from the Internet is allowed by the firewall to DMZ1. The firewall should only permit traffic via certain ports 80,, 25 etc.
Traffic from the Internet to the servers in DMZ2 is not permitted, at least not directly. A web server may need to access a database server, and while it may seem a good idea to have both of these virtual servers running on the same machine, from a security perspective this should be avoided. Ideally, both should be separated and placed in different DMZs. The same applies to front end web servers and web application servers which should similarly be placed in different DMZs. DMZ2 can connect to the internal zone for certain special cases such as backups or authentication via active directory.
The internal zone consists of workstations and internal servers, internal databases that do not need to be web facing, active directory servers, and internal applications. Note that the internal zone is isolated from the Internet.
Direct traffic from the internet to the internal zone should not be permitted. The above configuration provides important protection to your internal networks. In the event that a server in DMZ1 is compromised, your internal network will remain protected since traffic between the internal zone and DMZ1 is only permitted in one direction. A real world example of an unsegmented network and resulting attack is the massive Target data breach of Reportedly, the Target breach had its origin in a phishing email opened by an employee at a small HVAC company that did business with Target.
In the wake of the attack, Target implemented network segmentation to prevent the lateral movement that allows the attackers move with the system in this breach. Effective network segmentation also makes it easier to detect signs of an attack.
By concentrating on alerts related to sensitive parts of the network, security teams can prioritize incidents likely to be the most dangerous. Network segment traffic can also be monitored for unusual patterns or activity potentially indicating an attack.
Many sectors including manufacturing, retail and industrial are prime target for cyberattacks. Often organizations in these sectors are not up to date in terms of implementing key cybersecurity controls in order to be prepared for advanced and evolving attack methods. By adhering to network segmentation best practices, you can optimize network security.
Layered security allows for each security layer to compound with the others to form a fully functioning, complete sphere of security. The internal network ideally segmented and its data are surrounded by powerful, interwoven layers that an attacker must defeat.
These layers make security much more complex for a successful breach. Cybercriminals are already exploiting the lack of security at the DNS layer to conduct phishing attacks and gain access to proprietary enterprise data. Not securing the DNS layer is making it far too easy for hackers to take advantage. Securing the DNS layer is a straightforward process that requires no additional computer hardware or even any software installations.
Many vendors now offer cloud based DNS filtering solutions that can be set up in minutes. Network segmentation is concerned with dividing a network up into smaller segments called subnets. This can improve network performance and is important for security. By using firewalls between each segment, you can carefully control access to applications, devices, and databases and can block lateral movement in the event of a successful cyberattack.
Logical network segmentation is a popular way of segmenting a network. Instead of segmenting physical parts of the network such as routers and access points, logical segmentation uses concepts built into network infrastructure for segmentation, such as creating virtual local area networks VLANS that may share physical hardware. One of the requirements is to use network segmentation to keep the cardholder data environment CDE separate from other parts of the network.
Through network segmentation, organizations can isolate credit card data from all other computing processes. Network segmentation is a best practice that can help to reduce the damage caused by a malware or ransomware attack. If a computer is compromised, attackers will attempt to more laterally and access other devices and parts of the network. With network segmentation, lateral movement is much harder, so it is easy to contain malware and limit file encryption by ransomware.
There are three main benefits of network segmentation. First is security.
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