Firewall Audit SME (No third party vendor support needed)

Engagement Type

• Internal firewall audit supporting an Internal Audit team

• Not a penetration test and not a purely tool-driven compliance review

• Deep, process-heavy audit in an environment with limited pre-documented controls

Required Technical Skills

• Hands-on experience auditing internal firewalls (not just perimeter/external)

• Strong practical knowledge of firewall rule sets, including:

• Ports, services, zones, directions, and rule logic

• Administrative access controls and least-privilege enforcement

• Ability to manually analyze large firewall configuration exports and log data (millions of records if needed)

• Experience validating controls when automated tools (e.g., Tenable/CIS scans) are incomplete, misconfigured, or unavailable

• Comfort extracting evidence directly from firewall platforms (e.g., Palo Alto) and explaining findings at a granular level

Audit & Process Expectations

• Experience with internal audit environments where:

• Controls are not fully documented up front

• The auditor helps identify, validate, and document controls during the engagement

• Ability to assess and document:

• Secure configuration baselines

• Change management workflows (tickets, approvals, testing, deployment)

• Patch and firmware management accountability

• Compensating controls and risk acceptance

• Capable of producing detailed workpapers with clear attributes, observations, and conclusions (not just checklist results)