Check Point Harmony Endpoint provides unified security for all endpoints, regardless of location or ownership. It ensures consistent threat prevention, data loss prevention (DLP), and full traffic inspection (via VPN or direct internet access) are applied, meeting the requirement to secure all remote access to the same standard and prevent data exfiltration.

The ‘fw ver’ command provides detailed version information for all components, including the specific IPS engine. A Jumbo Hotfix Accumulator is a bundle; individual engine updates within it can be out of sync. This command will pinpoint the exact mismatch, confirming if the gateway needs a specific update push or a policy fetch to synchronize the IPS engine version before a successful policy install.

Websites that require client certificate authentication for form submission will fail under standard SSL inspection because the gateway cannot present the user’s unique client certificate to the external server. The correct solution is to create an exception in the decryption rule base to bypass inspection for this specific destination, allowing the direct client-server certificate handshake to occur.

Check Point firewalls process rules from top to bottom. To minimize lateral movement, the principle of least privilege must be enforced. Placing highly specific allow rules (e.g., App server IP to DB server IP on exactly port 3306) at the top ensures only explicit, necessary communication is permitted. Following this with broader ‘Drop’ rules between the respective network zones or objects blocks any other unintended traffic, effectively containing a breach.

The AD Query agent works by periodically querying the Domain Controller for user login sessions (via the session key). The default interval for this query is 15 minutes. When a password changes, the existing session key becomes invalid. The firewall continues to use the cached, invalid identity until the AD Query agent performs its next scheduled synchronization and retrieves the new session information, causing the observed delay.

The path ‘Monitor > Gateway Status > [Select Gateway] > Status Tab > Advanced > System Status’ provides a detailed breakdown of CPU usage per daemon/core. Here, you can see the specific CPU consumption of the ‘ipsd’ (IPS daemon) and other blades (like ‘fwd’ for firewall). This is the most direct way to identify if the IPS engine is consuming disproportionate CPU resources, causing the overall latency increase.

A single Check Point access rule can incorporate multiple dimensions. To meet all requirements, the rule must specify: the network source (‘Engineering’), the network destination (‘WebServers’), the user/group (‘Developers’ via the Identity Awareness blade which adds a ‘User’ column to the rule base), and a time object (‘Business Hours’). This creates a unified, enforceable policy that checks all four conditions (Source, Destination, User, Time) for each connection.

The Traffic Log records all allowed connections and, when Identity Awareness is enabled, includes the username associated with the source IP address at the time of the connection. By finding the log entry for the session where the file was downloaded (matching timestamp, source IP, and destination), you can identify the user account responsible. The Threat Prevention log would only have an entry if the gateway blocked it, and the Audit Log tracks administrative changes.

The Application Control blade includes the ability to identify and control specific applications within allowed network services. For SSH, it can be configured to detect the SSH protocol and, crucially, enable ‘SSH Command Logging’ or ‘SSH User Activity’ features. This provides the depth of inspection needed to log the commands being executed over the SSH session, which goes far beyond simple connection logging provided by the Firewall blade alone.

Check Point Harmony Endpoint provides unified security for all endpoints, regardless of location or ownership. It ensures consistent threat prevention, data loss prevention (DLP), and full traffic inspection (via VPN or direct internet access) are applied, meeting the requirement to secure all remote access to the same standard and prevent data exfiltration.0