Some recent responses from Meraki Support To break it down even more, there are two possible outcomes when an allow is logged: 1. The malicious traffic never made it into the network due to it being blocked by another process. 2. A single packet or two of the malicious flow was allowed but the flow was dead by the time Threat Protection made a determination. The current allowed threats I see in the network fall into the first category. To be specific, it was the inbound firewall rule that terminated this flow immediately with IDS/IPS following up after the fact with the malicious detection. This can be determined by looking at the firewall page and seeing that there are no port forwards configured for port 500 to allow the remote IPs. Thus, the deny any any rule of the inbound firewall would have blocked this traffic. In the second scenario, let's pretend there is a port forward allowing that remote IP. In this case, a packet or two may make it past before IDS/IPS makes a determination but once it does, it will block the rest of the flow. However, when logged as allowed, a packet or two of the malicious flow was allowed to flow into the network to the end destination however, this was all that was passed through as the flow itself was dead after this. No new packets after the malicious packet was received. In short for scenario 2, the MX will still block the malicious attack. Initial packets may go through, but the engine will block the flow. We've acknowledged your concerns about potential compromises with your MX, and upon reviewing the backend logs, there's no need for alarm. The alert was indeed flagged as malicious traffic, but it was promptly blocked and is no longer present. This may have caused the dashboard to display the event as allowed. However, you can rest assured that there shouldn't be any issues with a breach on your MX. My response: Ok, I get what you are saying, but this way of discerning what is an actual threat and what is a false positive is different that it used to be, would you agree? When anyone reviewing their security center sees an action of Allowed from a rogue, potentially malicious IP or URL going to one of their endpoints or server our first reaction is not, well even though it's marked allowed I'm going to assume nothing malicious was allowed get through..there really needs to be an explanation put out on the dashboard for everyone to see.
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