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

Threat intelligence with MineMeld

MineMeld is a tool provided by Palo Alto Networks and is an extensible threat intelligence processing framework. This means it is able to ingest several threat intelligence feeds and aggregate the information so that you can feed it into the firewall as an additional protection vector, which is pretty cool.

The installation is straightforward, and you can even run it in a Docker container:

sudo docker pull paloaltonetworks/minemeld
sudo docker volume create minemeld-logs
sudo docker volume create minemeld-local
sudo docker run -dit --name minemeld --restart unless-stopped --tmpfs /run -v minemeld-local:/opt/minemeld/local -v minemeld-
logs:/opt/minemeld/log  -p 443:443 -p 80:80 paloaltonetworks/minemeld

MineMeld can now be accessed via https://<hostIP>.

Important note

The -p 443:443 -p 80:80 flags tell Docker which host ports to map to the container ports – in this case, ports 443 and 80 on the host are directly...