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

Chapter 2: Setting Up a New Device

In this chapter, we will cover how you can gain access to the console and web interface of a fresh-out-of-the-box firewall appliance or a cleanly staged Virtual Machine (VM). You will learn how to license, update, and upgrade the firewall so that the latest features are available when you start building your security policy, and the latest signatures are always loaded onto the device to protect your users and infrastructure from malware and vulnerability exploits.

We are going to harden your management configuration to ensure a rigid security stance, and we will also look at the different types of network interface modes—aggregated interfaces and routing.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

  • Gaining access to the user interface
  • Adding licenses and setting up dynamic updates
  • Upgrading the firewall
  • Hardening the management interface
  • Understanding the interface types