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FortiGate lab 16 of 25

IPS and application control

Block a known exploit (Shellshock) with an IPS sensor and your own signatures, protect the firewall from an ICMP flood with a DoS policy, and control applications by category, including a custom application signature, then monitor what the engines saw.

Run this lab

It needs Lite: its 4 nodes are set to 4 vCPU and 5,632 MB in total. That fits the free demo too.

In your workspace: Shared, then FortiGate NSE 4 guided labs, then 16 - IPS and application control

Try it free for 30 minutesRun it on Lite from £3 a day

The free demo needs no card and no email. Every lab plan includes every guided lab.

Level
Advanced
Time
About 70 minutes
Nodes need
4 vCPU, 5,632 MB
Smallest plan
Lite

The scenario

Harbourside's security team has three requests. A penetration tester showed that a LAN machine could send Shellshock-style exploit requests to web servers on the internet unnoticed. Someone keeps flooding the firewall's WAN address with pings. And management wants games blocked as an application category, including the online shop's new "game zone", which no database knows about yet.

DeviceInterfaceAddressConnects to
FGT1port1 (ISP-A)203.0.113.1/24INET (test sites, the "attacker" for the flood)
FGT1port2 (LAN)10.1.10.1/24PC1 10.1.10.10, H1 by DHCP

Evaluation licence. No FortiGuard updates: the IPS and application databases are the ones built into the firmware. That's why this lab teaches custom signatures, which work on any unit and are how you react before a vendor signature exists.

What you’ll practise

  • Explain IPS signatures, sensors, filters, overrides and actions, and the IPS engine's resource use
  • Write custom IPS signatures in Fortinet's signature syntax
  • Block a known exploit and confirm it in the logs
  • Protect an interface against floods with a DoS policy
  • Build an application control sensor by category with a custom application signature
  • Troubleshoot traffic matching and monitor IPS and application events

The tasks

  1. Start the lab
  2. How IPS decides
  3. Custom IPS signatures
  4. An IPS sensor that blocks exploits
  5. A DoS policy against floods
  6. Application control by category
  7. Monitor and troubleshoot

The Lab Tasks pane has the scenario, these tasks, the checks to run, hints and the full solution.

Topology and devices

The network as it opens in EVE-NG, drawn from the lab’s own canvas, and the image each node runs.

Topology of IPS and application control4 nodes and 1 network, 4 links. Every link is listed as text below the diagram.FGT1INETPC1H1LANport2eth0eth0port1eth0
4 nodes and 1 network, with the interface names each link uses.
Every link, as text
  • FGT1 port1 to INET eth0
  • FGT1 port2 to LAN (network)
  • PC1 eth0 to LAN (network)
  • H1 eth0 to LAN (network)
Nodes in IPS and application control, with the image each runs and the vCPU and RAM it’s set to
NodeDeviceImage in Add NodeSet to
FGT1Fortinet FortiGatefortinet-FGT-v7.0.17.M-build06821 vCPU, 2,048 MB
INETEVE-NG GUI server (Docker)eve-gui-server:latest1 vCPU, 1,024 MB
PC1EVE-NG GUI server (Docker)eve-gui-server:latest1 vCPU, 2,048 MB
H1Alpine Linuxclbalpinebase-alpine-base-3-20-31 vCPU, 512 MB

How to open this lab

  1. Sign in to your workspace at lab.cloudlabbox.com.

  2. In File Manager, open Shared, then the folder FortiGate NSE 4 guided labs.

  3. Open 16 - IPS and application control and start its nodes, then open Lab Tasks for the scenario and the steps.

The lab is read-only. You can start the nodes and configure the devices, but changes to the topology can’t be saved. To change it, rebuild it in your own folder.

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CloudLabBox is independent of Fortinet. The lab follows exam topics and isn’t vendor training material; vendor names identify the exams and the images in the workspace.