FIREWALL SECURITY ASSESSMENT
Misconfigured firewall rules, redundant ACLs, and overly permissive access controls expose your perimeter to targeted intrusion. Attackers exploit these gaps to bypass network boundaries, escalate privileges, and reach critical systems undetected.
Cyphere delivers firewall security assessments covering rule-based analysis, policy review, and access control validation. Teams receive prioritised remediation guidance to remove high-risk rules, close network segmentation gaps, and strengthen perimeter defences across the UK, Europe, and the USA.
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What is Firewall security assessment?
A firewall security assessment (also known as a firewall ruleset review or firewall risk assessment) is a comprehensive audit of your firewall's configuration.
We examine rule sets, access control lists, logging, management interfaces, and policy enforcement. The assessment identifies vulnerabilities, security gaps, and overly permissive rules. We also hunt for conflicting rules, authentication weaknesses, and deviations from compliance requirements.
In hybrid and cloud environments, firewalls remain a vital component of network security architecture. Multiple firewall types protect modern organisations:
• Network firewalls with stateful inspection.
• Next-generation firewalls (NGFW).
• Web application firewalls (WAF).
• Virtual and cloud-native firewalls.
• Application-level gateways.
Each requires proper configuration to prevent unauthorised access, protect against cyber attacks, and control traffic flow. Our firewall security assessment helps you understand weak areas that increase exposure. We assess configurations for management oversights and compliance gaps that – when exploited – could lead to data breaches or exfiltration.
Get a Complete Firewall Security Assessment in the UK Before It's Too Late
Your firewall is often the first line of defence against external threats. It is a critical security control for protecting sensitive data on your internal network. Misconfigurations, conflicting rules, open ports, and weak access control lists (ACLs) create attack vectors that data breaches exploit daily.
We first sit with your team architects and solution designers to understand the business requirements and network architecture. Our team then assesses your firewall rule set, policies, logging, change management system, and compliance alignment. Our goal? To strengthen your overall security posture before potential threats become security incidents.
What makes us unique is how we care about outcomes—not just reports. We don’t cancel engagements; we don’t “report and run.”
We stick with you to move the risk-reduction needle in your business. You receive detailed reports with severity ratings, clear remediation guidance aligned to industry best practices, and post-assessment support that improves security controls across complex environments. Our team brings deep infrastructure experience – combining automated tools with manual validation to identify vulnerabilities that matter.
Cyphere Approach to Firewall Security Assessments
Why Cyphere Is the Best Choice for Firewall Risk Assessment
Outcome Focused
We are a trusted, independent CREST-accredited provider focused on outcomes. We care about what impacts the outcome whether it’s retests, remediation guidance, your team requiring architectural support not just a quick firewall review and never to be seen again.
Technical Expertise
Our guidance balances security controls with operational realities and requirements.
Prioritised Remediation
You fix the right problems first. We rank issues by exploitability, business impact, and compliance urgency.
No ‘report and run’ Approach
We combine technical depth with practical business focus, ensuring value add through risk remediation planning, unlimited support and retests.
Minimal Disruption
Efficient delivery via remote assessment coordinates with your internal change management processes.
Multi-Compliance Alignment
Get a clear line of sight from identified issues to requirements like FCA, NHS DSPT or PCI DSS.
Best Firewall Security Practices
We align to industry standards i.e. CIS benchmarks, Microsoft, AWS security best practices and then tailor controls to your specific business requirements. It includes performing checks for least privilege rule sets, hardened management access, specific service definitions, clean object libraries, comprehensive logging and overall layered protection measures.
Top Rated Service Quality
Our five star reviews and customer testimonials are live example for of delivery quality, client satisfaction and innovation. Service quality underpins everything we do.
What Makes Cyphere's Firewall Security Assessment Different?
Our CREST accreditation for the company and consultants means higher technical levels of delivery with respected certifications after delivering hundreds of such projects. You receive proven, real-world capability.
We re-validate corrections at no extra cost, ensuring protection remains effective.
As part of our after-care support, we run thorough debriefs with engineers and risk owners to explain technical elements and business impact.
We don’t cancel engagements last minute. We stay with you beyond the report to achieve practical risk reduction with our after care support that includes risk remediation planning support, debriefing your stakeholders and retests to confirm the fixes.
We don’t provide you just article references in report. Our reporting links risks to attack vectors and compliance standards – providing solutions your team can apply without vendor lock-in.
Why Investing in Our Firewall Security Assessment Pays Off
A firewall risk can impact your business integrity. This could be through insecure configuration because of default credentials, internet accessible admin interface, conflicting rules, permissive rules, end of life components in use or large attack surface without adding business value.
Insecure logging practices due to incomplete logs and disabled event forwarding delays your response to incident response situations. This adds to complexity and chaos when you should be busy supporting business to be up and running in least possible time.
Reduced breach likelihood: Tighten access controls and remove permissive rules before cyber criminals gain unauthorised access.
Stronger compliance position: Receive detailed reports that satisfy auditors for PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and UK GDPR without additional clarification requests.
Improved operational stability: Eliminate redundant or noisy rules to improve firewall performance, less confusing for admins and reduce troubleshooting time.
Enhanced detection capability: Strengthen logging and SIEM integration so security teams detect suspicious or unauthorised access attempts faster.
Measurable risk reduction: Post-remediation validation included within our offering helps you to demonstrate a reduced attack surface across your internal network and perimeter.
What people are saying about us
Excellent people to work with.
"Very good knowledge of requirement and give us correct findings with excellent remedy to improve our security for our B2B portal site."
Harman was great, really knowledgeable
"Harman was great, really knowledgeable, helpful and on hand to answer any questions. The final report was very clear providing all the technical information."
My experience of the team was 5 star.
"They were so helpful, and their technical delivery and client communication were excellent."
Extremely satisfied
"Extremely satisfied with their approach, speed and end results that I got for my company. Big Thanks."
Experienced Team
"Great experienced team, very knowledgable and helpful, willing to adjust the product to suit the customer. Would recommend."
Professional Work
"A totally professional engagement from start to finish with the highest quality advice and guidance."
High Quality Testing Service
"The service provided by Cyphere is second to none. High quality testing services. Very reliable and professional approach."
Assured Service
"Cyphere provide a personal and assured service, focusing on both pre and post analysis in supporting us to change and embed a security cultured approach."
Recommended Service
"Highly recommend Cyphere for pen testing. The recommendations in the report were comprehensive and communicated so that technical and non-technical members of the team could follow them."
Recommended Pen Testing Service
"Cyphere were great in both carrying out our penetration testing and taking us through the results and remediation steps. We would gladly use them for future projects.
Highly Recommended
"We had penetration tests service for PCI DSS compliance program from the Cyphere! Very professional, efficient communication, great findings that improved our system security posture! Highly recommended!
Exceeded Expectations
"Harman and the team at Cyphere truly are experts in their field and provide an outstanding service! Always going above and beyond to exceed customer expectations.
Skilled Team
I’ve worked with Cyphere on a number of penetration tests in addition to some cyber essentials support and certification! I’ve found them to be highly skilled and professional.
Skilled Team
I’ve worked with Cyphere on a number of penetration tests in addition to some cyber essentials support and certification! I’ve found them to be highly skilled and professional.
Perceptive Reporting
Cyphere undertook pen testing for us recently. The process was very smooth, and the team were flexible in working around our constraints. The report was clear, actionable and perceptive.
Outstanding Cybersecurity Partner
Cyphere has been outstanding partner to our agency. I've tried many in the past but they have been extremely meticulous in getting our systems secured.
Helpful Services
Cyphere has been an excellent partner and helped us achieve our goals with a great level of expertise, communication and helpfulness making the whole process easy to understand and complete.
High Standards
Harman and his team were excellent throughout, they understood and completed the tasks (external penetration test) within tight deadlines to a high standard.
Communicative & Responsive Team
I had an amazing experience working with Cyphere! Their communication was top-notch, making the entire process smooth and efficient. I found their team to be incredibly responsive and attentive to my needs.
Efficient Service
Worked with team at Cyphere for a cyber security assessment, gap analysis etc. The team has delivered a very professional, efficient service at all stages of the process to date.
Firewall Risk Assessment: Sector Specific Expertise
Firewall risks vary by industry and network architecture. We tailor our assessment to your specific regulatory requirements to combine context and expertise:
We validate segmentation between cardholder data environments (CDE) performing network level checks in addition to pen testing use cases.
We test segmentation, fraud attack vectors and prove your architecture meets Gambling Commission expectations.
We test and support your teams to enforce isolation between public guest Wi-Fi and sensitive clinical or research zones. This is to help you align with NHS DSPT if you are a trusts, care body and DTAC controls if you are a service supplier into NHS.
We look for opportunities to tighten egress filtering to prevent data exfiltration. By auditing access control lists, we help you meet SRA requirements and protect privileged client data.
We secure payment paths and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) along with any birdges between production and development networks. Our annual health checks including firewall audit helps close security gaps in third-party integrations – protecting your brand from disruption.
We support standardisation of rule sets across multi-site networks. This also includes identifying issues such as EOL hardware, contractual frictions with vendors who don’t want to account for security and provide remediation paths that fit within limited budget constraints.
Combined Services: Pair firewall assessments with targeted penetration testing
This validates segmentation and lateral movement controls. We test whether firewalls properly block unauthorised access between zones – confirming that trust boundaries hold under attack.
We validate internet-facing exposure, open ports, DDoS protections, and network firewall/WAF effectiveness. This identifies vulnerabilities in publicly accessible services and confirms your firewall’s ability to defend against external threats.
We assess cloud-native firewalls (Azure Firewall, AWS Network Firewall, Google Cloud Firewall) alongside your cloud infrastructure. This combined approach tests IAM policies, security group configurations, network ACLs, and cloud firewall rules to identify misconfigurations that expose workloads. We validate whether cloud firewall policies effectively segment VPCs, prevent lateral movement across cloud accounts, and enforce least-privilege access – proving your cloud perimeter holds under real-world attack scenarios.
We assess REST and GraphQL APIs alongside your API gateway and firewall configurations. This combined testing validates authentication mechanisms, authorisation controls, rate limiting, and input validation—while proving whether gateway-level protections (request throttling, IP whitelisting, JWT validation) effectively prevent API abuse. We test for broken object-level authorisation, mass assignment, injection flaws, and excessive data exposure – ensuring API gateways and firewall rules work together to protect sensitive data and prevent unauthorised access.
We check guest network isolation and rogue access point risks. We validate that Wi-Fi networks cannot bypass firewall policies or reach sensitive internal network resources.
We assess domain trust paths, group security policy effectiveness, Kerberos attack vectors and privilege escalation routes to validate your active directory security. We prove that risky protocols (SMB, LDAP, Kerberos) are contained by properly configured rules and do not create attack vectors.
We test your web applications and API while simultaneously evaluating Web Application Firewall (WAF) effectiveness. This dual approach identifies vulnerabilities in application code (OWASP Top 10, business logic flaws, authentication bypasses) and proves whether your WAF rules successfully block exploitation attempts. Cyphere pen testers test rule effectiveness, false positive rates, bypass techniques, and coverage gaps—ensuring your WAF protects against injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and application-layer threats without blocking legitimate traffic.
We assess containerised environments and Kubernetes clusters alongside network policies and micro-segmentation controls. This testing validates pod-to-pod communication restrictions, namespace isolation, ingress/egress firewall rules, and service mesh security. We prove whether Kubernetes Network Policies, Calico rules, or service mesh configurations (Istio, Linkerd) effectively contain compromised containers and prevent lateral movement across your cloud-native infrastructure—ensuring container firewall policies align with zero-trust principles.
Frequently Asked Questions about Firewall Security Assessment
We assess hardware, virtual, and cloud-native firewalls. Supported platforms include bu tnot limited:
• Vendors: Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco (ASA/FTD), Check Point, Juniper, Sophos, SonicWall, and WatchGuard.
• Cloud: Azure Firewall, AWS Network Firewall, and Google Cloud Firewall.
• WAF: F5 Advanced WAF, Cloudflare WAF, AWS WAF, and Imperva.
A firewall is your primary gatekeeper at your perimeter. Regular assessment is critical because configurations “drift” over time due to changes big and small. It’s importance increases if you handle regulated data (financial services, PCI, health records) or manage complex environments with multiple administrators.
Primary security objectives include:
• Validating access controls align with your security policy.
• Removing overly permissive and conflicting rules.
• Reducing the attack surface by closing unnecessary ports/services and noise traffic (broadcasts).
• Proving compliance with regulatory standards.
• Ensuring traffic flow supports business needs without introducing risk.
A firewall security assessment takes 5 to 10 business days. Factors include understanding of firewall and overall network architecture discussing with the customer teams, and device count, rule complexity, and the number of environments (Production, DR, Cloud). We provide fixed timelines in our proposal after a scoping call.
Most of the firewall assessments range from £2,500 to £10,000. Factors include the number of devices, rule set size, and whether WAF or cloud-native firewalls are in scope. We provide transparent, fixed-fee quotes that include 12 months of free retests.
Yes. We provide prioritised recommendations with implementation steps and relevant guidance. Our consultants remain available to your engineers during the remediation phase to clarify findings and troubleshoot technical issues.
