Always Innovating in NetSec Series: User Experience, Threat Coverage and Management

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This blog originally posted on July 25, 2023.

Our latest edition of Always Innovating in Network Security is here! Palo Alto Networks is always innovating to protect our customers and help them manage cyber risk. As we mentioned in the June 2023 edition, at Palo Alto Networks, we are constantly delivering new features that address the most important security needs and we want to ensure you are informed. Our network security features and innovations are now cloud delivered, which means they are immediately available to our users on our latest PAN-OS version. Our Cloud Delivered Security Services (CDSS) are being updated with new protections via a SaaS based model, delivering enhanced security as soon as they are released.

For this edition of the Always Innovating in Network Security Series, we have exciting announcements around innovations in AI Operations (AIOps) & Management, Advanced WildFire (Malware Analysis and Prevention) and Software Firewalls. This wide range of innovations cover areas of improving user experience, expanding coverage of threat protection and improving management ability for cloud firewalls.

1. AIOps for NGFW

We’re excited to introduce a new management experience exclusively to all AIOps for NGFW premium customers. You can now effortlessly create consistent security policies once and enforce everywhere, while easily managing your network lifecycle via the cloud. AIOps not only strengthens security and prevents network disruptions, but also simplifies management across PA-Series and Software Next Generation Firewalls, Prisma Access, Cloud Delivered Security Services and Prisma SD-WAN.

Additional key enhancements include:

• Incident and alert experience, leveraging a common alerting framework to identify network disruptions.
• Best practice recommendations and workflows to strengthen security posture and eliminate risk.
• Customizable dashboards, such as SD-WAN, Advanced Threat Prevention, consolidated best practice assessment) and more!

For a detailed overview of the release, visit the live community blog post.

2. Advanced WildFire Regional Clouds - We continue our commitment to customers worldwide by investing in our local cloud infrastructure. Advanced WildFire has recently launched four new cloud locations in Poland, Indonesia, France and Taiwan to help organizations like yours stay secure while meeting data residency requirements. Our newly added data locations will provide a global, cloud-delivered, community-driven approach to aggregated threat analysis while addressing various data location needs. Palo Alto Networks simplifies compliance and certification with local cloud security infrastructures in more than 76 countries worldwide. Check out our products and their certifications on our website.

3. Advanced WildFire Script Sample Analysis - The Advanced WildFire public cloud can now analyze and classify the following script files:

• JScript (.js)
• VBScript (.vbs)
• PowerShell Script (.ps1)

Upon discovering a malicious script, the Advanced WildFire cloud generates and distributes C2 and DNS signatures to firewalls to prevent successful script-based attacks. These signatures can detect activity in previously unknown malicious scripts. To ensure protection against the latest threats, always keep your firewalls up-to-date with the latest content and software updates from Palo Alto Networks. For more information about script sample analysis, visit Palo Alto Networks Tech Docs.

4. Panorama Integration with Cloud NGFW for AWS: Palo Alto Networks continues to streamline and centralize our security services with our latest Panorama Integration with Cloud NGFW for AWS. As an alternative to AWS Firewall manager, organizations can now use Panorama to manage Cloud NGFW for AWS. Customers can manage all aspects of policy configurations in Cloud Device groups, push these policies, view logs and generate reports on traffic patterns of your Cloud NGFW resources - all from a single Panorama console. The security policy management features available to customers via this integration are here. For a video demo to setup Cloud NGFW for AWS integration with Panorama, click here.

5. Shared VPC Support in the Panorama GCP Plugin: Organizations deploying workloads in Google Cloud are increasingly adopting the Shared VPC Model, where security teams centrally manage network and security resources used by other teams’ service projects. With the latest Panorama GCP plugin 3.1.0 update, organizations can onboard their Shared VPC Host Project to automatically onboard all associated service projects. By doing so, organizations can dynamically detect and use newly spun-up workloads in granular security policy with no manual intervention! For more information on using and setting up the plugin, please refer to tech docs.

With constant innovations, our products continue to deliver Industry leading Network Security solutions, helping our customers always stay ahead of adversaries. This month’s innovations improved AI Operations (AIOps) & Management, Advanced WildFire (Malware Analysis and Prevention) and Software Firewalls. Be sure to check back next month for more cutting edge innovations that we will keep rolling out.