In today’s multi-vendor firewall landscape—SonicWall, Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet, you name it—the real challenge isn’t the volume of alerts, it’s the fact that defenders are drowning in vendor-defined noise while adversaries move with zero friction. Attackers don’t care which firewall brand you use; they probe them all the same way, exploiting whatever CVE is easiest, chaining behaviors across edges, VPNs, and segmentation layers faster than most teams can triage a single ticket. That means security organizations must break out of the old model of blindly trusting each vendor’s severity ratings and instead normalize everything into a unified risk framework driven by asset criticality, exploitability, and real-world threat intel. The teams who win will be the ones who correlate signals across all their firewalls, prioritize based on behavior and KEV-level urgency, and automate the enrichment so analysts aren’t stuck babysitting logs. This isn’t about choosing which vendor screams the loudest—it's about building a single view of risk so defenders can cut through the noise, stay ahead of active exploitation, and finally move at the speed the threat actors already operate at. And as powerful as automation and AI have become, they’re still only force multipliers—not replacements. Organizations need AI Powered Threat Hunters who bring intuition, adaptability, and human judgment to fill the gaps machines can’t, turning raw data into decisive action and keeping defenders one critical step ahead of the enemy.
The STR Team was featured on this topic here:
https://www.scworld.com/news/cyberattacks-on-legacy-firewalls-continue-what-security-teams-can-do