Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks

By : Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'
Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks

By: Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'

Overview of this book

To safeguard against security threats, it is crucial to ensure that your organization is effectively secured across networks, mobile devices, and the cloud. Palo Alto Networks’ integrated platform makes it easy to manage network and cloud security along with endpoint protection and a wide range of security services. With this book, you'll understand Palo Alto Networks and learn how to implement essential techniques, right from deploying firewalls through to advanced troubleshooting. The book starts by showing you how to set up and configure the Palo Alto Networks firewall, helping you to understand the technology and appreciate the simple, yet powerful, PAN-OS platform. Once you've explored the web interface and command-line structure, you'll be able to predict expected behavior and troubleshoot anomalies with confidence. You'll learn why and how to create strong security policies and discover how the firewall protects against encrypted threats. In addition to this, you'll get to grips with identifying users and controlling access to your network with user IDs and even prioritize traffic using quality of service (QoS). The book will show you how to enable special modes on the firewall for shared environments and extend security capabilities to smaller locations. By the end of this network security book, you'll be well-versed with advanced troubleshooting techniques and best practices recommended by an experienced security engineer and Palo Alto Networks expert.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: First Steps and Basic Configuration
4
Section 2: Advanced Configuration and Putting the Features to Work
10
Section 3: Maintenance and Troubleshooting

The Application Command Center

Next to reports that run on a daily basis, the ACC lets you get a quick look into what is happening in your network by using simple graphs that you can drill down into for more information. There are four default tabs:

  • Network Activity, which gives you an overview of all the applications seen in the specified timeframe, their byte count, the session count, the threat count, and the number of users. If you scroll down, you will see more detailed source and destination graphs and which rules have been hit most.
  • Threat Activity gives you a breakdown of all the types of threats and how many times they were seen.
  • Blocked Activity shows which applications have been blocked due to threats, content, or URL actions
  • Tunnel Activity is used to report on tunnel inspection for GRE, GPRS, and non-encrypted IPSec.

You can also add a tab and create a page with all the widgets you like in one single pane, which may be useful if you want to...