Recent Log4Shell and SpringShell vulnerabilities created havoc for many organizations struggling to discover the impacted resources. The Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud (CSPM and CWPP) not only can help the organizations to discover the impacted resources, but can also protect the exploit from happening.   In this article, we will walk you through how to leverage the Prisma Cloud Product in order to gain visibility of your cloud resources.

A best practice in security is alerting on the assets that you find most critical.  The concept of vulnerability and exploit defines that a vulnerability can be exploited.   

Throughout the security lifecycle of an application or cloud environment it is important to be able to understand the tools available to each security professional. One of the best tools for any security professional to be able to use is scripting. Scripting allows one to create a program that automates an individual task and, when coupled with the Prisma Cloud Compute Workload Protection Platform (CWPP), you can effectively complete your use cases with ease. All that it takes to create a script is an understanding of the tools available to you, practice, and studying the available documentation of API calls that can interface with your scripting program.    Through the CWPP API and this article, you will be able to begin to establish a new way to be able to solve your company’s problems while enhancing your available tools in problem solving. In this article, we are utilizing a SaaS CWPP console for the examples and a text editor which can save text files for scripting along with a linux command line available in MacOS terminal or in Windows with Subsystem for Linux.    When interacting with a command line, you can type directly into the command prompt. As an example, to help those of you who have not yet worked with a Linux command line, you can navigate to different directories using the “cd” or ‘current directory’ command. You can determine the path to your current directory by typing “pwd,” or ‘print working directory’, and you can list the files in the current directory using “ls”.

This guide describes how to configure agentless vulnerability and compliance scanning for virtual machines in Microsoft Azure subscriptions.   This article will use a credential dedicated to the agentless scanning process.  In Prisma Cloud Enterprise Edition  / SaaS, you have the additional option of using a Prisma Cloud onboarded account credential which will be covered in a future article. The creation and use of an Azure service principal credential are also supported in SaaS.