Articles Tagged ‘firewall’

Can Stateful Inspection Evolve?

January 5th, 2010

One of my many roles as a founder and CTO is to meet with customers and talk about their network security issues. These visits are not only informative, they can be humorous as well. For example, a recent visit to a large, fortune 500 company, they told me that one of our firewall competitors explained [...]

A Key Benefit of Next-Generation Firewalls: More Sleep

December 16th, 2009

There’s a great article on SearchEnterpriseWAN about a Palo Alto Networks customer.  IDT spoke to SearchEnterpriseWAN about its experiences using next-generation firewalls from Palo Alto Networks, and discussed some of the benefits and changes their team recognized in managing security across their enterprise.  IDT describes many of the usual benefits around application visibility and control [...]

The Danger of Overreacting….

November 20th, 2009

There is a somewhat erroneous assumption that the web provides anonymity – in particular when someone is posting a comment on an article. And then there is the old saying that knowledge is power. The challenge some people face is what to do with it.

Now More Than Ever.

October 20th, 2009

Now more than ever, business and security teams need to align their business priorities. Case in point, highlighted by two recent articles on social networking use in the business world. The first article, published in eWeek UK, states that most CIOs are blocking (or trying to block) social networking sites.
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/cios-frown-on-social-networking-at-work-2007 http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10014107o-114626b,00.htm https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/home.aspx http://www.aiim.org/

Balancing the Risks and Benefits of Evasive Applications

September 8th, 2009

We often use the term evasive as a means of describing how an application can bypass a traditional stateful inspection firewall. “Applications use tactics such as port hopping, non-standard ports, SSL encryption and emulation to evade the firewall.” While wholly accurate, the term carries negative connotations, implying the application is behaving badly. In reality, [...]

Blocking Social Networking is an Exercise in Futility

August 21st, 2009

This Mashable news article talks about how companies are blocking social networking sites. I would call this an exercise in futility. I say this because users will find a way. Social networking, along with IM, Twitter and streaming music have become part of many employees’ daily fabric. When companies try to block these applications, several [...]

Applipedia on the iPhone!

August 19th, 2009

As some of you may have heard, Palo Alto Networks dropped an iPhone app late last week.  We built it primarily so that our customers and partners could have an in-pocket version of our Applipedia, but there are a couple fun features in there too (e.g., access to this blog, Palo Alto Networks videos).

Traffic Analysis: P2P Found 92% of the Time

July 30th, 2009

The most recent discovery of the first lady’s safe house (Laura Bush) and a detailed list of the civilian nuclear complex, including precise locations of weapons grade nuclear fuel follows closely on the heals of previous P2P discoveries of Marine One blueprints and healthcare records.
Should we really be surprised? No not really, given the findings [...]

IPv6 Threat – Real or Perceived?

July 22nd, 2009

This Network World article talks about the hidden threat posed by rogue IPv6 usage. To a certain extent, this is a bit of a red herring and here’s why. For IPv6 to traverse the corporate network, the routers, switches and infrastructure components need to (a) support IPv6 and (b) it has to be enabled.
Now, assuming [...]

The Twitter Hack: Highlighting the Need to Safely Enable Applications

July 15th, 2009

A recent New York Times blog entry discusses the recent Twitter hack and the safety of cloud-based applications. For an enterprise, safely enabling cloud-based applications means managing which applications you embrace as well as the types of documents and content you share over those approved applications.