In a lot of situations where we take over server management from clients we often see bad security practices, where the client does not understand the inherent risk and just wants everything to work. Some administrators that don’t know what they are doing often just disable the entire firewall and hope that their application works at that moment. We even see suppliers of large applications such as Microsoft Dynamics and SQL server applications kill the Windows Firewall because of a lack of knowledge.

We try to help these suppliers and administrators setting up correct Windows Firewall rules when we notice this happens, but to make sure that we are able to notice it we need to have monitoring on our servers for when someone disables the firewall. We also have seen bad actors disable the Windows Firewall after penetrating other layers.

To start, we’ll first check if the simplest part of the Windows Firewall is configured correctly: we check if the Firewall profile is enabled

$FirewallProfiles = Get-NetFirewallProfile | Where-Object { $_.Enabled -eq $false}
If(!$FirewallProfiles) { $ProfileStatus = "Healthy"} else { $ProfileStatus = "$($FirewallProfiles.name) Profile is disabled"}

The issue with just monitoring this is pretty obvious: What if someone has the firewall enabled, but changed the configuration to “inbound connections that do not match a rule are allowed”, So for that we’ll add two simple lines:

$FirewallProfiles = Get-NetFirewallProfile | Where-Object { $_.Enabled -eq $false}
If(!$FirewallProfiles) { $ProfileStatus = "Healthy"} else { $ProfileStatus = "$($FirewallProfiles.name) Profile is disabled"}
$FirewallAllowed = Get-NetFirewallProfile | Where-Object { $_.DefaultInboundAction -ne "NotConfigured"}
If(!$FirewallAllowed) { $DefaultAction = "Healthy"} else { $DefaultAction = "$($FirewallAllowed.name) Profile is set to $($FirewallAllowed.DefaultInboundAction) inbound traffic"}

Hope this helps making your environments a little safer, and as always Happy PowerShelling!