Fortiguard Service Status

[Yoana Terrano]

Mostexploits and virus exposures occur within the first 2 months of a known vulnerability. Most botnets consist of thousands of zombie computers whose IP addresses are continuously changing. To keep your defenses effective against the evolving threat landscape, Fortinet recommends FortiGuard services. New vulnerabilities and botnets are discovered and new signatures are built by Fortinet researchers every day.

Security is only as good as your most recent update. Without up-to-date signatures and blacklists, your network would be vulnerable to new attacks. However, if the updates were released before adequate testing and not accurate, FortiWeb scans would result in false positives or false negatives. For maximum benefit and minimum risk, updates must balance the two needs: to be both accurate and current.

FortiWeb also can use virus definitions to block trojan uploads, and can use IP reputation definitions to allow search engines but block botnets and anonymizing proxies preferred by hackers. FortiGuard services ensure that your FortiWeb is using the most advanced attack protections. Timely updates are crucial to defending your network.

You can manually update the geography-to-IP mappings and the attack, virus, and botnet signatures that your FortiWeb appliance uses to detect attacks. Updating these ensures that your FortiWeb appliance can detect recently discovered variations of these attacks, and that it knows about the current statuses of all IP addresses on the public Internet.

After restoring the firmware of the FortiWeb appliance, you should install the most currently available packages through FortiGuard. Restoring firmware installs the packages that were current at the time the firmware image file was made: they may no longer be up-to-date.

Most critical of them is Web Filter rating query - if your Fortigate cannot get answer what category the web site belongs to, access to this web site will be blocked by default. It means that if for any reason Fortigate cannot reach Fortiguard servers and it has security rules with Web Filtering by Category configured - those rules will BLOCK users access to ANY website, not just malicious ones.

First, check status of license/subscription and FortiGuard connection status in System -> FortiGuard - the Web Filtering status should be in green. This checks subscription license status, but not always detects connection to the FortiGuard status. If you see it red, it is most probably a license/subscription issue to be checked with Fortinet TAC, as subscription checks are done once in a while and are cached. To check actual connectivity to the FortiGuard servers - on the same page, under Filtering subsection, there is Test Connectivity button to push. It should return status as Up/green. Also pay attention to the widget on the same page in the right bottom corner FortiGuard Filter Rating Servers, it shows real time stats and IP addresses of the servers the Fortigate is trying to reach. If timings are unusually high and in red, there could be network connectivity problem, we will look at next.

Even better check is to run ping exe ping to all the hostnames above to see if the Fortigate can resolve AND can reach them. The most important of them being service.fortiguard.net.

Here:

Status - shows if Web Filtering as a service is enabled.

Protocol - via what protocol this Fortigate is trying to reach FortiGuard servers (more on this below).

Anycast - whether this Fortigate is trying to reach Anycast servers of FortiGuard (more on this below).

Server List - actual list of FortiGuard servers that this Fortigate was/is trying to reach. Here most important is status legend:

- F: failed, bad - Fortigate tried few times to reach this server to no avail. Note that it is bad only if ALL servers in the list have this status. It is OK if only few of the servers are unreachable.

- D: this server was successfully resolved from FQDN to its IP address, but it does not indicate its reachability yet.

- I: server to which Fortigate tries to initiate connection, most frequently goes with D,it does not indicate if a server is working or not yet.

- T: server was found, it answered, and is now being "timed", i.e. its answer time/RTT is being measured.

- TZ: Time Zone, while not a status indicator, Fortigate tries and prefers servers with the least time zone difference in hope of geographic proximity. Therefore, it is quite important to set correctly the time zone for your Fortigate.

Fortigate communicates for its functions with just one server at a time - the one on top of the list. The rest of the servers are being constantly monitored and their RTT, and packet loss measured. If the top-list server fails, it will be replaced with the next best one and so on. We do not have capability to influence this server list manually.

So if all servers in the list have F(ailed), what do we do next?. This may mean either all Fortiguard servers at the Fortinet side are down (less likely), or that this Fortigate has the problem of reaching them at the network level.

Fortigate can use several ports to talk to Fortiguard servers (or Fortiguard Distribution Network as they call it) - 53, 8888, 443, the default being 8888. The port 53 is a well known DNS protocol/port, only that Fortigate uses proprietary UDP/53 obfuscated/encrypted protocol to query the servers, and for this reason some IPS/anti-DDoS/etc protections on the way from Fortigate to FortiGuard may mark such traffic as malicious and drop it. You can check if it is the case by going to System -> FortiGuard -> Filtering and change (if set so) from port 53 to port 8888. On newer FortiOS versions (6.4 and up) they moved this to CLI only: config sys fortiguard then set port 538888443. So, as first debug measure it is recommended to try all possible ports and see if status of connection to the FortiGuard servers changes. Note about protocol I mentioned before - in 6.4 and newer they added option to force the communication to FortiGuard servers to be a valid HTTPS traffic, which is most likely to pass the Internet successfully. For this you have to enable it (in addition to setting port to 443) via CLI: config sys fortiguard, then set protocol https end.

Important note if you have VDOMs enabled - all communication to the Fortiguard network is initiated from management/root VDOM only! The frequent human error I've seen - someone by mistake changes management domain to the VDOM that has no/limited access to the Internet and as a consequence, it cannot reach FortiGuard network. Very common, indeed. To verify who is the management VDOM:

Anycast servers - starting with FortiOS 6.4 the default setting to reach FortiGuard is anycast. The intention was good - to improve reachability of FortiGuard servers, but unfortunately the implementation did not live up to the expectations. More often than not it actually creates a problem in reaching the Fortinet servers. It may improve in the future, but for now my advice is to disable anycast and switch back to unicast servers. You do so in CLI:

If FortiGuard is having system outages or experiencing othercritical issues, red down notifications appear on the status page. Inmost cases, it means that core functions are not working properly, orthere is some other serious customer-impacting event underway.

Warn notifications are used when FortiGuard is undergoing anon-critical issue like minor service issues, performance degradation,non-core bugs, capacity issues, or problems affecting a small number ofusers.

FortiGuard does not post separate notifications for planned maintenancework so we are unable to send notifications when maintenance windows begin.If you need FortiGuard maintenance notifications, pleaseemail us.

FortiGuard does not publish a feed of proactive maintenance events on theirstatus page at this time. If they do, be sure to let us knowand we'll aggregate FortiGuard maintenance events into your unified calendar.

Because FortiGuard has several components, each with theirindividual statuses, StatusGator can differentiate the status of eachcomponent in our notifications to you. This means, you canfilter your status page notificationsbased on the services, regions, or components you utilize.This is an essential feature for complex services with many componentsor services spread out across many regions.

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