FortiOS 6.2 Intrusion Prevention System Best Practices

Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)

Your FortiGate’s IPS system can detect traffic attempting to exploit this vulnerability. IPS may also detect when infected systems communicate with servers to receive instructions. Refer to the following list of best practices regarding IPS.

• Enable IPS scanning at the network edge for all services. l Use FortiClient endpoint IPS scanning for protection against threats that get into your network.
• Subscribe to FortiGuard IPS Updates and configure your FortiGate unit to receive push updates. This will ensure you receive IPS signature updates as soon as they are available.
• Because it is critical to guard against attacks on services that you make available to the public, configure IPS signatures to block matching signatures. For example, if you have a web server, configure the action of web server signatures to Block.
• Create and use security profiles with specific signatures and anomalies you need per-interface and per-rule.
• Do not use predefined or generic profiles. While these profiles are convenient to supply immediate protection, you should create profiles to suit your network environment.
• If you do use the default profiles, reduce the IPS signatures/anomalies enabled in the profile to conserve processing time and memory.
• If you are going to enable anomalies, make sure you tune thresholds according to your environment. l If you need protection, but not audit information, disable the logging option. l Tune the IP-protocol parameter accordingly.