The Cisco ASA must be configured to enable threat detection to mitigate risks of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

A firewall experiencing a DoS attack will not be able to handle production traffic load. The high utilization and CPU caused by a DoS attack will also have an effect on control keep-alives and timers used for neighbor peering, resulting in route flapping and will eventually black-hole production traffic.

The device must be configured to contain and limit a DoS attack's effect on the device's resource utilization. The use of redundant components and load balancing are examples of mitigating "flood-type" DoS attacks through increased capacity.

NOTE: When operating the ASA in multi-context mode with a separate IDPS, threat detection cannot be enabled, and this check is Not Applicable.

Review the ASA configuration to determine if threat detection has been enabled.

threat-detection basic-threat

If the ASA has not been configured to enable threat detection to mitigate risks of DoS attacks, this is a finding.

Configure threat detection as shown in the example below.

ASA(config)# threat-detection basic-threat