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Product Overview

The Cisco ASA is a series of network security devices that provide firewall, VPN, and intrusion prevention capabilities to protect corporate networks and data centers. As a firewall, the ASA inspects network traffic and enforces access control policies to block unauthorized access and malicious activity at the network perimeter. In addition to stateful firewall inspection, Cisco ASAs offer a range of integrated security services, including remote access VPN (AnyConnect) and site-to-site VPN, ensuring secure connectivity for a distributed workforce. Its security features help defend against a variety of network-based attacks and provide a foundational layer of security for an organization's infrastructure.

Detection Strategy for Network Integrations

Detection

Network traffic monitoring is a critical element of our detection strategy, offering insight into the activity of data as it moves across an organization's systems. The network traffic data source focuses on network connection creation (the initial construction of a network connection such as socket information, and src and dst IP and Ports ), network traffic content (logged network traffic data showing both protocol header and body values like PCAP), and network traffic flow (summarized network packet data, with metrics, such as protocol headers and volume like netflow or http logs).

We pull this information into our detection pipeline as events in the form of both security alerts and raw telemetry (depending on the integration). When a threat is detected, our automated response bot, Ruxie, takes action by enriching evidence fields with first- and third-party threat intelligence. Additional Ruxie actions query a wide span of technologies directly to arm analysts with key pieces of investigative information and related events.

Response

Network technologies are utilized for support across many types of Expel Alerts such as endpoint and cloud. The main focus of the response strategy is on source IP, destination IP, and domain tracking to identify related connections, along with user activity summaries to give extra alert context.

To learn more about our overall approach to detection strategy, see About Detection Strategy.

What We Support for Cisco ASA

To see a comprehensive list of the most up-to-date Expel detection rules, vendor detection rules, opt-in detections, and available DUETs (did you expect this) that we support for Cisco ASA, you can visit the Detections page in Workbench or ask your Sales or Support rep for the most recent download.

Additional Details and Common Questions

Console Access

A vendor alert does not typically include all of the contextual timeline activity surrounding the event of interest. Because this integration does not allow us to get all necessary data via the API, we will ask you for a certain level of console access during onboarding.

The level of access that we require is meant to support essential triage and research activities, and to help us determine the vector and extent of attacker activity for an identified threat. At minimum, we will ask for visibility into alert data, timeline events recorded, and live response/real time response shell (if applicable).

DUET

A DUET rule flags certain events as needing an immediate verification or notification, and bypasses the normal internal event triage process. The events subject to DUET rules contain behaviors that are not typically indicative of true security incidents, as they are related to policy violations or potential risk.

There are a number of workflows that a DUET may follow. When enabled, the activity will be flagged for investigation and will be routed to you (rather than to us) to take a specified first action. To see the specific DUET rules currently supported for this integration, visit the Detections page in Workbench.