I don’t know about you, but last week, I got my fill of mini Snickers®, Kit Kats® and “fun-size” candy to last me another year. As all of us take down our Halloween decorations in our office cubes, we acknowledge that we have to resume our normal day-to-day activities [read: fewer calories]. For network security administrators, that means you’re probably back at your desk monitoring your users’ activities via the logs and alerts generated across all of the security consoles and management screens for your enterprise network.
The trick with legacy security devices is that they don’t provide a complete, seamless view of what’s happening on your network, and they often require multiple tools to manage all of your policies. That’s why for Palo Alto Networks customers, the real treat is having a next-generation network security platform in your bag. Administrators are able to build dynamic, contextual policies that tap into all of the technologies designed in our extensible platform.
As with any holiday season, this time of year brings an influx of scams and threats that your users face as they utilize your network to access the Internet. That’s true whether they’re using the laptop or workstation you’ve provided them, not to mention mobile threat risks associated with the use of their own personal devices. It’s with those challenges in mind that we built our PAN-DB URL filtering technology, which allows you to reduce malware incidents by prohibiting access to known malware and phishing-based websites.
What you do is simply create a new URL filtering profile to categorize the URLs with an action set to block both the “Malware” and “Phishing” categories. Now apply this URL filtering profile within any existing or new security policy rule for outbound connections. The idea is that you can easily create relevant policies that keep out the bad stuff without harming your organization’s productivity.
Stay safe, and Happy [fill in the blank]. Well, you get the point…
- Dana Torgersen, Product Marketing Manager