Check Point WAF was mostly used for monitoring and securing internet-facing applications and APIs receiving traffic from outside clients. The majority of daily operations entailed examining rejected requests, analyzing security events post-deployment, and tuning protection rules in case legitimate traffic was impacted. The main asset in terms of operational activities was insight provided at the HTTP and API level. This allowed for examination of request patterns, header details, path and URL parameters and, if needed, the actual contents of blocked requests, rather than looking at basic network data. It made things more clear whether strange behavior was caused by legitimate application operation, automated scanning, or attack attempts against available services. Post-updates policy tuning was done occasionally because even minor front-end or API changes were affecting some protection settings.

Most of my work with the Check Point Next Generation Firewalls involved analyzing firewall logs, verifying security policies following infrastructure changes, and examining traffic within, outside, and across the network. One feature that came in particularly handy was having detailed information for any connection that was blocked. Rather than just getting information about the source and destination, I was able to examine the traffic at the application level to see which services and protocols were causing the traffic. In the context of policy changes or adding new apps, this allowed me to make sure that there wasn't any unnecessary exposure while retaining necessary business traffic. Checking hit counts and ensuring that traffic was behaving as expected after making policy changes was also an important task.

i like its high level of security, blocking almost all threats effectively. It has simple cloud dashboard, which makes it easier to manage security for remote and hybrid workers in one place.