When thinking about corporate cyberattacks, a lot of people, including business owners and stakeholders, picture a movie scene. Some hooded hacker sits in a dark room, cracking through layer after layer of code until the wall finally gives in. It’s a good scene in a movie, but it’s not usually how it happens in real life.
More often, a firewall fails quietly. Because there are times when a rule that should have been deleted years ago is still sitting there, wide open and nobody remembers why it was created in the first place. Nobody’s watching it. Nobody’s using it on purpose. It’s just there, waiting for the wrong person to notice it before your own team does.
That’s exactly the kind of thing a firewall review is meant to catch. If you’ve never had one done, or it’s been a while since the last one, here are five questions worth bringing up with your IT team this week.
Question #1: Do we actually know what’s in our firewall right now?
This sounds like a simple question, but a lot of businesses genuinely can’t answer it with confidence. Firewalls tend to grow messier over time without anyone meaning for it to happen. A rule gets added for a project that wrapped up two years ago and never gets removed once the project ends. Another gets created as a quick fix during a busy week and somehow becomes permanent, because nobody circles back to clean it up.
Over months and years, this adds up. What started as a tidy, purposeful set of rules slowly turns into something closer to a junk drawer, full of things that used to matter and a few things nobody can explain anymore.
A firewall review exists specifically to answer this question, not with a guess or a general sense that things are “probably fine,” but with an actual list of what’s active right now and why it’s there. Once you can see the full picture, it’s usually a lot easier to spot what doesn’t belong.
Question #2: Does every rule have someone responsible for it?
Ownership sounds like a small detail, but it makes a bigger difference than most people expect. If a rule doesn’t have a name attached to it and nobody can explain the business reason it exists, it becomes incredibly easy for it to be forgotten. And whatever gets forgotten is much easier to misuse, whether that’s by an outside attacker or simply by human error down the line.
This is one of the simplest things a firewall review checks, and it’s often the most revealing part of the whole process. It tends to show, very clearly, just how much has been added to a network over the years without anyone keeping proper track of it. Some businesses are surprised by how many rules come back with no clear answer to “who owns this, and why do we still need it?”
Getting into the habit of assigning ownership isn’t complicated. It just requires someone to actually ask the question regularly, instead of only asking it after something’s already gone wrong.
Question #3: If one device gets compromised, can it reach everything else on our network?
This is arguably the question that matters most, because it isn’t really about whether something bad could happen. Something bad happening is always a possibility, no matter how careful a business is. This question is really about how far that one bad moment could spread once it starts.
A network without proper segmentation lets a single infected laptop wander freely into places it was never supposed to touch. That could mean drifting from a shared marketing folder straight into your financial systems, simply because nothing was ever set up to stop it. The device didn’t need permission. It just needed an open path, and open paths are exactly what tend to build up in a firewall that hasn’t been reviewed in a while.
Segmentation is really just about drawing internal boundaries, so that one compromised device stays contained to a small corner instead of having free rein over everything. It’s less like locking every door in the building and more like making sure a break-in on the ground floor doesn’t automatically hand someone the keys to every other floor too.
Question #4: Is the firewall itself properly secured, not just the rules inside it?
It’s easy to spend all your attention on the rules and completely forget about the device that’s actually running them. A firewall is a piece of hardware or software in its own right, and it needs its own upkeep separate from whatever policies are configured on top of it.
Default passwords that were never changed. Older, insecure protocols that should have been switched off years ago. Firmware that hasn’t been updated in longer than anyone would like to admit. None of these show up if you’re only looking at the rulebase, but each one quietly weakens the firewall regardless of how clean and well-organised the rules look on paper.
A thorough firewall review looks at both sides of the picture together. It’s not enough to have a tidy set of rules sitting on top of a firewall that hasn’t been properly maintained underneath. The two need to be checked side by side, because a strong rulebase can’t make up for a weak foundation.
Question #5: When did someone last actually check all of this from the outside?
Internal teams are busy keeping the business running day to day. They’re not usually sitting around auditing their own setup unless something forces them to. That’s completely normal and it’s not a criticism of anyone’s IT department. It’s just how priorities naturally work when there’s always something more urgent in front of you.
The problem is that risk doesn’t pause just because nobody’s actively looking for it. A rule that’s been quietly open for a year doesn’t become safer with time. If anything, the opposite tends to happen, since more systems and more people come to depend on it the longer it sits there unnoticed.
Bringing in an outside review means someone with fresh eyes is finally checking, rather than everyone assuming things are fine simply because nothing has gone wrong yet. An internal team knows the network intimately, which is valuable, but that same familiarity can also make it easy to overlook things that would stand out immediately to someone looking at it for the first time.
What actually happens during a firewall review
If you’ve never gone through one, the process is a lot less disruptive than people expect. It usually starts with gathering documentation: the current rules, any network diagrams that exist, and whatever security policies your business already has in place. From there, it moves into a closer look at the rulebase itself, checking for rules that are too broad, rules that overlap or conflict with each other, and older rules that nobody’s touched in a long time.
After that comes a look at the firewall device itself, checking things like passwords, outdated protocols and firmware versions. None of this requires ripping anything out and starting over. Most of the time, it’s about tightening what’s already there, removing what no longer serves a purpose and documenting things clearly enough that the next review is faster and easier than this one.
Why this matters more than it might seem
It’s tempting to assume that if nothing has gone wrong yet, everything must be fine. But a firewall that hasn’t been reviewed in a while isn’t necessarily safe. It’s just untested. There’s a real difference between those two things, even though they can feel identical from the outside.
A firewall review does not mean we are assuming the worst or treating your team like they’ve done something wrong. It’s simply just to make sure that the picture in your head of how your network is protected actually matches reality. For a lot of businesses, those two things have quietly drifted apart over time without anyone noticing and the only way to know for sure is to actually go and check.
Worth finding out sooner rather than later
None of these means your firewall is broken or that your team has been careless. It just means most firewalls build up clutter over time, the same way most desks and inboxes do, and that clutter is usually invisible until someone actually goes looking for it with the right eyes and the right process.
A proper firewall review does exactly that. It works quietly, without disrupting your day-to-day operations, and without assuming the worst about your setup going in. It simply shows you what’s actually there, so you can decide what to do about it with real information instead of a guess.
If it’s been a while since anyone checked, it might be worth finding out what’s actually sitting inside your firewall right now.
Get a free firewall health check. If we don’t find anything, you owe nothing.
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