Firewall logs anatomy
A firewall generates very useful logs, including valuable information. By understanding these firewall logs and their valuable information, you can investigate several attack tactics, such as lateral movement, reconnaissance, command and control, and exfiltration.
Let’s discuss and explain all the possible fields that exist in the logs that are generated by a network firewall, regardless of the vendor or product name, and how to benefit from them during incident investigations.
The firewall log fields are called Log Timestamp, Source IP, Source Port, Destination IP, Destination Port, Source Interface Zone, Destination Interface Zone, Device Action, Sent Bytes, Received Bytes, Sent Packets, Received Packets, Source Geolocation country, and Destination Geolocation country. We’ll look at these in detail in the following subsections.
Log Timestamp
The Log Timestamp value contains information that identifies when a certain event occurred....