topic WildFire & Office Documents/PDFs - Limitations? in General Topics

WildFire & Office Documents/PDFs - Limitations?

networkadmin — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 18:25:36 GMT

We currently use Wildfire on "PE Executable" filetypes on our PA-500.

I'm interested in using it against Office documents and PDFs as those are clearly a major threat vector.

Thing is, whatever model of Palo Alto I look at, they all seem to show low WildFire limits which makes me question how they cope with things like SMTP where there may be lots of emails with attachments passing through the firewall?

PA-500 10 files/minute

PA-3020 50 files/minute

PA-7050 100 files/minute

This just doesn't seem like much given how many emails might be flowing so I'm wondering if I've missed something fundamental?

Re: WildFire & Office Documents/PDFs - Limitations?

reaper — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 09:06:25 GMT

These rates are actually the number of unique file uploads per minute per chassis. An important detail is that an upload will only occur for a file that has not been seen before. Whenever the firewall sees a file passing through it will check with the cloud if this file has been seen before and will only initiate an upload if the file is unknown. Consecutive sessions containing that same file will no longer trigger an upload.

This process is also independent of any hits on the AV and WildFire threat databases, who will function in-line (and at an unlimited rate) in blocking infectious files

hope this helps

Tom