About File Policies and Advanced Malware Protection
To detect and block malware, use file policies. You can also use file policies to detect and control traffic by file type.
Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Firepower can detect, capture, track, analyze, log, and optionally block the transmission of malware in network traffic. In the Firepower Management Center web interface, this feature is called AMP for Networks, formerly called AMP for Firepower. Advanced Malware Protection identifies malware using managed devices deployed inline and threat data from the Cisco cloud.
You associate file policies with access control rules that handle network traffic as part of your overall access control configuration.
When the system detects malware on your network, it generates file and malware events. To analyze file and malware event data, see File/Malware Events and Network File Trajectory.
File Policies
A file policy is a set of configurations that the system uses to perform malware protection and file control, as part of your overall access control configuration. This association ensures that before the system passes a file in traffic that matches an access control rule’s conditions, it first inspects the file. Consider the following diagram of a simple access control policy in an inline deployment.
The policy has two access control rules, both of which use the Allow action and are associated with file policies. The policy’s default action is also to allow traffic, but without file policy inspection. In this scenario, traffic is handled as follows:
-
Traffic that matches
Rule 1
is inspected byFile Policy A
. -
Traffic that does not match
Rule 1
is evaluated againstRule 2
. Traffic that matchesRule 2
is inspected byFile Policy B
. -
Traffic that does not match either rule is allowed; you cannot associate a file policy with the default action.
By associating different file policies with different access control rules, you have granular control over how you identify and block files transmitted on your network.