Failed to connect to Fortiguard servers verification and debug

Fortiguard is a subscription based service from Fortinet, where your Fortigate queries their servers in real-time for various services: Periodic checking of Fortigate subscription/license validity for Web Filtering/AppControl/AntiVirus/AntiSpam/DNS Filtering. Real-time querying for visited by users web sites rating. Periodic signatures updates for IPS/AppControl/AntiVirus …



50,000 VPN usernames and their passwords from Fortigates around the world were leaked last week – what you can do to prevent it from happening to you

Around 50,000 Fortigate VPN accounts from around the globe were leaked to the public Internet last week. Not really news anymore, you can learn details elsewhere. What I asked myself about that was – is there anything to be done to prevent or lower the damage of such vulnerabilities? The …



Nfdump netflow/sflow cookbook of examples

Table of Contents Introduction Start nfcapd netflow collector in a daemon mode listening on port 5001 with all extensions enabled and saving received netflow data into the named folder NFS-cisco-rtr. Accept netflow records only coming from the sender with the IP of 13.13.13.137 Read and print all …



Using external threat feeds in FortiGate has become much easier with 6.0 and 6.2 versions

Recently I had the opportunity to configure an external threat feed as a block list for the Fortigate and was pleasantly surprised by how much simpler it has become. Task at hand: Block incoming connections sourced from IP addresses supplied as a list by a 3rd party commercial Threat Intelligence …



Fortigate guest user accounts - create, edit, delete and deploy

The guest user accounts are special in Fortigate and unlike regular local Firewall user accounts. The flow of creating them is: Let's configure it. First, you create Groups, which serve, in this case, as a template for various parameters users can/must have later: User & Device -> User Groups -> New .. -> Type …



Fortigate how to verify that IPS is actually working

Is your IPS actually doing what you expect? You have to test your configurations, especially with the Intrusion Prevention System, which demands not only On/Off switch, but also tuning or it may become useless. With AntiVirus we have Eicar fake virus on eicar.org to download. With IPS there …



Fortigate to Fortimanager management tunnel connection debug how-to

When the policy install fails on Fortimanager, it may mean many things as the process is quite complex with database/policy verification. But frequently, it happens because the communication tunnel between Fortimanager and Fortigate is down. The tunnel works on port 541, is encrypted (so we cannot see the contents …



Fortiweb Cookbook: Most Basic Setup - One website, add HTTPS support, Round Robin load balancing between two physical servers, all protections on Alert only, Host header filtration

Task: Taking the basic setup a step further, let's enable HTTPS protocol between clients and Fortiweb for the yurisk.com. Solution. Step 1. Create certificate signing request (CSR) to use in issuing the SSL certificate. I will use Ubuntu server. It does not have to be a server actually hosting …



Fortiweb Cookbook: Basic setup - adding web site access authentication with local and remote (LDAP) users

Task: Continuing the Basic setup, we want to protect access to some pages, namely the root document "/" and "/treasure" with username and password. For this we want 2 kinds of users: local created on the Fortiweb, and remote residing in the Active Directory of the company. Even though it is …



Fortigate Local in Policy what it does and how to change/configure it

Fortigate comes with some services allowed in incoming direction, even without any configuration done by you. Important to note is that in such pre-configured security rules the destination is mostly the Fortigate itself, sometimes its specific interfaces, sometimes all of the interfaces. That is, this does not allow access though …