Intrusion Policy Settings in an FDM-Managed Access Control Rule

Cisco delivers several intrusion policies with the Firepower system. These policies are designed by the Cisco Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group, who set the intrusion and preprocessor rule states and advanced settings.

License and Action Requirements for Intrusion Policies

  • Licenses-To add intrusion policies to a rule, you need to enable an license on the FDM-managed device

  • Rule action-you can configure intrusion and file policies on rules that allow traffic only. Inspection is not performed on rules set to trust or block traffic. In addition, if the default action for the access control policy is allow, you can configure an intrusion policy but not a file policy.

Available Intrusion Policies for an Access Control Rule

For access control rules that allow traffic, you can select one of the following intrusion policies to inspect traffic for intrusions and exploits. An intrusion policy examines decoded packets for attacks based on patterns, and can block or alter malicious traffic.

The policies are listed from least to most secure:

  • Connectivity over Security—This policy is built for organizations where connectivity (being able to get to all resources) takes precedence over network infrastructure security. The intrusion policy enables far fewer rules than those enabled in the Security over Connectivity policy. Only the most critical rules that block traffic are enabled. Select this policy if you want to apply some intrusion protection but you are fairly confident in the security of your network.

  • Balanced Security and Connectivity—This policy is designed to balance overall network performance with network infrastructure security. This policy is appropriate for most networks. Select this policy for most situations where you want to apply intrusion prevention.

  • Security over Connectivity—This policy is built for organizations where network infrastructure security takes precedence over user convenience. The intrusion policy enables numerous network anomaly intrusion rules that could alert on or drop legitimate traffic. Select this policy when security is paramount or for traffic that is high risk.

  • Maximum Detection—This policy is built for organizations where network infrastructure security is given even more emphasis than is given by the Security Over Connectivity policy, with the potential for even greater operational impact. For example, the intrusion policy enables rules in a large number of threat categories including malware, exploit kit, old and common vulnerabilities, and known in-the-wild exploits. If you select this policy, carefully evaluate whether too much legitimate traffic is being dropped.