Palo Alto Networks Provides a New Breed of Intelligence to Detect and Prevent

Back in June, Microsoft patched 59 Internet Explorer vulnerabilities and Palo Alto Networks discovered 21 of them, all rated critical. Then in July, we released findings about evolved Nigerian 419 scammers from Unit 42, the new Palo Alto Networks threat intelligence team.

The way we perform cybersecurity research is opening the door to a new breed of intelligence that I predict will reshape how organizations gather and share cyber intelligence while converting it to actionable indicators.

The reason is evasive applications.

I won’t go into exact numbers, but we have teams dedicated to knowing everything there is to know about enterprise applications and how attackers use them. You’ve seen that every year in our annual Application Usage and Threat Report and it’s something we stress in all of our research efforts. In addition, we’ve invested serious resources to create a scalable cloud infrastructure for our security researchers so they can immediately convert results from their research into actionable indicators for our customers.

What you’re going to see next is how this more comprehensive and coordinated approach creates a new breed of cybersecurity intelligence – one we can share with Palo Alto Networks customers and partners to make better-informed decisions about advanced cyber threats and how to prevent them.

When you have a chance, take a look at Applipedia, which was the industry’s first application-specific database used for actionable security intelligence. We add additional applications weekly, and continuously update evasive applications as they change. If you’re a current Palo Alto Networks customer, maybe you’ve been one of our (frequent) requests to perform one-off analysis on specific applications. It’s a service that continues to become powerful and valuable when security administrators need to control specific applications their businesses want to utilize. I can see CIOs and CISOs taking advantage of this type of service so they can remain relevant to business lines and reduce risk while embracing new applications.

Take the evasive application advantage away from attackers.

Evasive applications provide a significant advantage to attackers. To take back that advantage, companies need to control applications on their enterprise and distinguish the normal applications from the bad. All the security research performed by our experts is actionable intelligence converted back into our product for all customers so they can control applications out-of-the-box. This is in addition to continuous AntiVirus, WildFire, DNS, URLs, IPS and C2 updates across all network traffic…and yes, we do that stuff out-of-the-same-box as well.

Take some time to learn more about our new breed of intelligence by browsing the Unit 42 home page and visiting the Palo Alto Networks booth at Black Hat USA this week in Las Vegas. I addition, I recommend quickly reading our new Consortium page to see our commitment to intelligence sharing. Please click the link and learn how to join. Work with us to help prevent attacks.