After the Capital One data breach, which was reportedly caused by an improperly configured firewall, every company should be paying attention to its firewalls.

This is not the first data breach that has occurred because a firewall was not properly in place for data stored in the Cloud. I’m a lawyer, and I know very little about the technical components of a firewall, but I do know how important they are for protecting the perimeter of your network, and that a firewall is a critical part of a security program meant to protect data.

When we do post-mortems after security incidents and data breaches, there are always lessons to be learned and ways to improve one’s security posture. Let’s all learn from the Capital One incident and pay attention and check our firewalls as a short-term priority.

Eerily, this type of breach was predicted earlier this year by Security Metrics in its publication Security Trends: Data Breach Statistics From 2018 and Predictions for 2019, which predicted that data stored in the Cloud would be breached. It also reported that a top organizational vulnerability is the firewall, and that an improperly configured firewall is “most common.” Check out Security Metrics’ take on trends and predictions here.

To read more about common firewall configuration mistakes, check out this article by our friends at Dark Reading. And remember it’s the beginning of a new month. Make August “Firewalls Priority Month.”