Gateway Security

What an Internet Hub is Used for and the Different Types Available

Essential Facts about Gateway Security for Websites

Cybercriminals can leverage unauthorized traffic entering your network, to attack you. Gateway security solutions prevent unsecured web traffic from entering your internal network. Enterprises typically use these solutions to protect users from accessing or getting infected by malware. Secure web gateways often sit between the Internet and internal users, analyzing traffic in and out of the network to identify potentially malicious content.

Gateway security solutions act as virtual checkpoints that prevent malicious traffic from entering your network. Traffic governed by secure web gateways is all inline since the gateway stands between your network’s incoming and outgoing data. As a result, users will only access secure and approved websites, while the web gateway will block others. A more complex function of gateway security is safeguarding sensitive data such as intellectual property and confidential information from exfiltration.

Why Gateway Security Is Necessary

In recent years, secure web gateway solutions have become increasingly popular. Cybercriminals are using more sophisticated techniques to target networks. Their preferred method entails embedding threat vectors into seemingly harmless or professional-looking websites. The websites can compromise your network when users access them by releasing malicious codes that grant cybercriminals access to data without your knowledge.

Some of the websites that users can access look so authentic to the extent that they might be convinced to provide their credit card numbers or their personal identification information (PII). Gateway security solutions not only flag such websites but also block access to them. This is done by preventing data from leaving your network.

How Gateway Security Solutions Work

Typically, secure gateways get installed either as hardware devices at user endpoints or as software components. Traffic flowing from users to external networks and vice versa must go through the gateway for evaluation. The traffic will get monitored for malicious code, user/non-user attempted URL connections and web application use.

A gateway security solution also checks and filters URLs against a database of known and approved sites. Those that are not on the approved lists will get blocked, thus barring access to the websites. Typically, URLs of known and approved sites are maintained on whitelist databases, whereas addresses or off-limit websites are maintained on blacklist databases.

While checking data flowing out of your network, gateway security solutions will block any data sources that are prohibited from distribution. Application-level controls can also get restricted to well-known and approved functions. This could include barring uploads to SaaS apps such as Office 365. Although some organizations deploy gateway security in hardware devices that filter incoming and outgoing traffic, others use cloud-based SaaS secure gateways that are easy to deploy and maintain.

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Benefits of Using Gateway Security Solutions

The benefits of gateway security go beyond filtering your network traffic to identify and block malicious content. Secure web gateways provide additional benefits such as:

• Encrypted Traffic Evaluation. Secure gateways compare all network traffic against local and global databases and reputable sources to analyze the nature of the traffic and whether it poses any threat to your network. This also includes the evaluation of SSL-based encrypted traffic.
• Support for All Protocols. For your network to be fully secure, FTP, HTTP, and HTTPS internet protocols ought to be supported. Although HTTPS is currently the industry standard, many websites still support FTP and HTTP connections, something that puts them at risk. Gateway security helps prevent breaches on such sites.
• Data-Loss Prevention. If, for instance, your website accepts uploaded data or documents, it is susceptible to cyber-attacks. With web gateway solutions in place, you won’t have to worry about the security of uploaded data or materials. The documents will get scanned to determine the sensitivity of the data before getting uploaded.
• Integration with EDR Security Monitoring. Most gateway security solutions on the market come with a monitoring feature that notifies you about any problems on your network. The updates that you get from this security info and event management feature help you to secure your network all the more.

Given the prominent role that employees play in matters relating to IT security, web gateways should be a priority. Contrary to what you might think, the web gateway market is on an upward trajectory, something that attests to the burgeoning importance of gateway security solutions.

With cybercriminals becoming more tech-savvy, you need security products that can stop them in their tracks. The web filtering tools that NuEduSEC provides can counter all types of malware that cybercriminals might use to attack your network. Besides, they offer zero-day malware detection as well as SSL inspection, thus ensuring that encrypted data gets fully scanned.