Firms can address the increasing ability of attackers to bypass border firewalls by ________.

• A. Both A and B
• B. Hardening Hosts
• C. Neither A Nor B
• D. Having Multiple Border Firewalls

Answer: (B)

When attackers can bypass the outer firewall, strengthening the security of the endpoints themselves becomes crucial. Hardening hosts reduces the attack surface and increases resilience by ensuring systems are up to date, minimize exposed services, and enforce strong authentication and access controls. This includes patching, removing unnecessary software, disabling unused accounts, applying secure configurations, and using host-based protections like firewall rules and monitoring. By making the individual machines themselves tougher to compromise, you limit what an attacker can achieve even if the perimeter is bypassed.

Having multiple border firewalls adds redundancy at the network edge but doesn’t directly reduce the risk on the hosts once traffic reaches them. It helps with perimeter filtering but doesn’t address vulnerabilities on the devices inside the network, whereas hardening hosts directly mitigates that risk. In practice, a defense-in-depth approach would use both, but the option that best addresses bypassed borders is hardening the hosts.