URL Filtering - is this necessary - need clarification

[TonyDeHart]

My predecessor managing the Palo firewalls always entered a website/URL four times in the URL Blocklist using the format below as an example:

netflix.com

*.netflix.com

netflix.com/

*.netflix.com/

Is this really necessary?

Doesn't *.netflix.com accomplish the same thing or are these all necessary? 

The examples here: https://knowledgebase.paloaltonetworks.com/KCSArticleDetail?id=kA14u000000oM79CAE

don't really answer the question - what do I enter to block everything to google.com (using the example in the doc) regardless of subdomains or pages or whatever.

Thanks. This may seem obvious but I'm not following this for some reason or, maybe, you really do need all four entries.

[Claw4609 · Accepted solution]

It depends on the PAN-OS version you are running. I believe that before 10.2 Palo default appended urls with a "*" at the end if nothing was specified. so thus why you would create a url with "/" at the end. But 10.2 and after Palo now default appends with "/" if nothing is specified. The url *.netflix.com wouldnt hit if the url was just neflix.com but would cover things like www.netflix.com

So assuming youre running a pre-10.2 pan-os version here are some examples of urls that would be hit:

netflix.com - netflix.com.phising.com

*.netflix.com - www.netflix.com.test.com

netflix.com/ - netflix.com or netflix.com/movie/play

*.netflix.com/ - www.netflix.com  or www.netflix.com/movie/play

Pan-os 10.2 or later

netflix.com - netflix.com or netflix.com/movie/play

*.netflix.com - www.netflix.com or www.netflix.com/movie/play

netflix.com/ - netflix.com or netflix.com/movie/play (netflix.com/ and netflix.com would be the same)

*.netflix.com/ - www.netflix.com or www.netflix.com/movie/play (*.netflix.com and *.netflix.com/ would be the same)

[TonyDeHart]

So it sounds like we do want all four since we are on 10.1.x (the latest...) and would want to account for country code version variations of sites such as netflix.com.au (if that existed...).

10.2 and up sounds like we can trim this back to two entries we just aren't there yet.