Cisco 300-710 - Securing Networks with Cisco Firewalls

Traditionally, a firewall is a routed hop and acts as a default gateway for hosts that connect to one of its screened subnets. A transparent firewall, on the other hand, is a Layer 2 firewall that acts like a “bump in the wire,” or a “stealth firewall,” and is not seen as a router hop to connected devices. However, like any other firewall, access control between interfaces is controlled, and all of the usual firewall checks are in place. Layer 2 connectivity is achieved by using a " bridge group " where you group together the inside and outside interfaces for a network, and the ASA uses bridging techniques to pass traffic between the interfaces. Each bridge group includes a Bridge Virtual Interface (BVI) to which you assign an IP address on the network. You can have multiple bridge groups for multiple networks. In transparent mode, these bridge groups cannot communicate with each other.https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/security/asa/asa97/configuration/general/asa-97-general-config/intro-fw.html

The Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE) in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is enabled under the SSL tab of an access control policy. EVE provides visibility into encrypted traffic, allowing the firewall to detect threats even when traffic is encrypted.

Steps to enable EVE:

Navigate to the access control policy in FMC.

Go to theSSLtab.

Enable Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE) to analyze encrypted traffic.

This configuration helps in identifying and mitigating threats within encrypted traffic without the need for full decryption.

The capture should be taken on the DMZ interface of the perimeter firewall because this is the firewall interface closest to the affected server. Capturing there shows the packets delivered to the server and the TCP RST packets returned by it. This placement helps determine whether the reset originates from the server, whether address translation changed the connection, or whether the firewall generated or altered the traffic. Capturing only on the internet-facing interface would show the external behavior but provide less certainty about what reached or left the DMZ server. The perimeter router and ISP router are even farther from the suspected source. Cisco troubleshooting guidance recommends capturing as close as possible to the relevant endpoint and on the associated firewall data interface. List B’s supplied answer C is therefore incorrect and has been corrected to D. Cisco firewall capture analysis

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To streamline the process of reviewing events and modifying blocking of specific files across both the firewall console and the endpoint console, the security engineer should initiate the integration between Secure FMC and Cisco Secure Endpoint (formerly AMP for Endpoints) from the Secure FMC using the AMP tab.

Steps:

In the FMC, navigate toDevices > Device Management.

Select the device and go to theAMPtab.

Initiate the integration by configuring the necessary API credentials and linking the FMC to the Cisco Secure Endpoint console.

This integration allows the security engineer to view endpoint events and apply blocking actions directly from the FMC, consolidating the management tasks.

This approach simplifies the workflow by providing a single interface to manage both network and endpoint security, reducing the time and effort required to maintain security across the organization.

The content keyword is used to specify a string or pattern to search for in the payload or stream of a packet. The string must be enclosed in quotation marks and can use modifiers such as nocase, depth, offset, and so on. The string can also use hexadecimal notation by using a pipe symbol (|) before and after the hexadecimal characters. For example, content: " |45 5* 26 27 4 0A| " will match any payload or stream that contains the hexadecimal bytes 45 5 26 27 4 0A followed by any number of bytes2

To support more than two interfaces per context and enable NAT configurations, the firewall must operate in routed mode. Since the firewall was previously in transparent mode, the network engineer needs to change it to routed mode.

Steps:

Access the CLI of the Secure FTD device.

Run the commandconfigure firewall routedto switch the firewall from transparent mode to routed mode.

Reregister the FTD device with the FMC by running theconfigure manager add < FMC_IP > < Registration_Key > command from the FTD device CLI.

This will ensure that the firewall can support the required NAT configurations and more than two interfaces per context.