You can now deploy Cortex XDR in the India region. When you choose the IN region during activation and setup of Cortex Data Lake, you keep all Cortex XDR logs and data within the India boundary.

If you use Cortex XDR Prevent or Cortex XDR Pro per Endpoint, when the Cortex XDR agent identifies unknown files, Cortex XDR sends them to the WildFire Singapore Cloud for analysis. Starting October 2021 Cortex XDR will integrate with WildFire located in India to allow you to keep all Cortex XDR Agent WildFire traffic within the Indian boundary.

For increased visibility into your Cortex XDR license details, Cortex XDR now displays in the Cortex XDR License window a list of all the license and add-on types allocated to your account. To help you easily track your licenses, the list includes the start and end dates of your current and future licenses.

The free evaluation period of the Host Insights add-on in Cortex XDR is now extended from 30 days to 60 days. You can use this extended 60-day period for better evaluation of the Host Insights add-on functionality.

To expand your investigation capabilities, Cortex XDR now enables you to purchase compute units to carry out additional investigation actions.

As of Cortex XDR version 3.0, the compute units can be used to run additional XQL Query APIs in addition to the free quota provided by Cortex XDR.

The Compute Units add-on provides you with an additional 1 compute unit (formally query units) per day, in addition to your free daily quota to run XQL Query APIs. Each XQL query consumes compute units based on the timeframe, complexity, and the number of API response results. Compute units are first deducted from your free daily quota followed by the Compute Units add-on.

To help you track your compute units, in the Cortex XDR app, you can view the following information:

For an added layer of security when sending reports using email, Cortex XDR now allows you to specify one or more domain names that can be used in your distribution lists. By defining a domain, you can for example ensure information is not sent outside your organization.

To provide more granular control of permissions for your administrators, Cortex XDR now enables you to configure read-only and read-write permissions independently for all Settings. To provide continuity for existing admin roles and privileges, Cortex XDR assigns both by default but you now have the option to configure the view and action settings independently for both your new and your preexisting admin roles.

You can now define granular role-based access control for the following pages in the Cortex XDR management console:

To align with the new naming in the hub, Directory Sync Services has been renamed to Cloud Identity Engine.

Starting with this release, you can deploy the Cortex XDR agent on Kubernetes Clusters as a daemonSet on any Kubernetes cluster. Being natively integrated in Kubernetes using the deamonSet, the agent provides visibility into containers and ensures full coverage of your critical production workloads.

To deploy the agent, you must have the new license type Cloud per Host and then create a Cortex XDR agent YAML installation package in Cortex XDR which allows you to configure attributes such as namespace default value and nodeselector. Once the Kubernetes agent is running on the endpoint, Cortex XDR displays the Kubernetes Cluster and includes in the causality card a visual indication on processes that are running within containers, including information about the container itself such as its name, ID, image, etc.

For more information, refer to Cortex XDR agent administrator guide.

To extend visibility into your cloud network traffic and to further enrich incident data, Cortex XDR can now ingest cloud network traffic logs from:

For more information on these collectors, see External Data Ingestion Vendor Support.

Cortex XDR normalizes the logs from the different platforms into a single XDR schema and creates searchable datasets. Additionally, Cortex XDR optimizes and reconstructs the flow logs into single session communications which are later stitched into network stories and alerts.

To begin receiving logs you must first set up the relevant

Configurations

Data Collection

Collection Integrations

settings for the vendor in Cortex XDR. As soon as Cortex XDR begins receiving logs, Cortex XDR automatically creates a dataset using the vendor and product you specified during the log collector setup. You can then use XQL Search to initiate queries on the dataset.

To extend visibility into your cloud platform, Cortex XDR can now ingest cloud audit logs from

For more information on these collectors, see External Data Ingestion Vendor Support.

Cortex XDR normalizes the audit logs from the different cloud platforms into a single XDR schema to create raw datasets, for each platform individually as well as into a single collective searchable dataset.

To begin receiving logs you must first set up the relevant

Configurations

Data Collection

Collection Integrations

settings for the vendor in Cortex XDR. As soon as Cortex XDR begins receiving logs, Cortex XDR automatically creates a dataset using the vendor and product you specified during the log collector setup. You can then use XQL Search to initiate queries on the dataset.

To streamline investigation of cloud-related alerts, Cortex XDR developed a proprietary algorithm that highlights the most relevant events and alerts associated with a cloud-related alert.

To help you identify and investigate cloud- specific data associated with cloud-related alerts, Cortex XDR displays a new Cloud Causality View and includes the following table fields:

To provide additional alert visibility and improved analytics, Cortex XDR can now ingest Prisma Cloud alerts. To receive alerts, configure

Configurations

Data Collection

Collection Integrations

settings for the product in Cortex XDR.

Cortex XDR adds Prisma Cloud alerts to the Cortex XDR Alerts table and groups them into Incidents. Additionally, when Cortex XDR begins collecting data, the app creates a new dataset (

prisma_cloud_raw

) that you can use to initiate XQL Search queries and to create Correlation Rules.

To provide additional alert visibility and improved analytics, Cortex XDR can now ingest Prisma Cloud Compute alerts. To receive alerts, configure

Configurations

Data Collection

Collection Integrations

settings for the product in Cortex XDR.

Cortex XDR adds Prisma Cloud Compute alerts to the Cortex XDR Alerts table and groups them into Incidents. Additionally, when Cortex XDR begins collecting data, the app creates a new dataset (

prisma_cloud_compute_raw

) that you can use to initiate XQL Search queries and to create Correlation Rules.

Cortex XDR now offers a new add-on that enables you to perform comprehensive forensic investigations on your Windows endpoints.

With its deep data collection, the Forensics add-on enables you to find the source and scope of an attack, and determine what, if any, data was accessed. As an end-to-end solution, Cortex XDR Forensics helps you with every step of an incident response, from data collection, analysis, threat hunting, and remediation.

Using a host timeline, you can view user activity across multiple forensic artifacts in a single table. For a more detailed view, right-click on any row in the timeline for a complete listing of all fields for that item. The historical artifacts collected by the Forensics add-on can provide investigators with insight into Windows file access and process execution, even for files and executables that have been deleted from the host.

The triage functionality in the Forensics add-on collects detailed system information, including a full file listing for all of the connected drives, full event logs, and registry hives, so you can get a complete holistic picture of an endpoint.

You can perform a deep dive on a single endpoint or search for artifacts across all your endpoints from the Forensics workbench. For advanced detective work, you can use the XQL Search feature to query across all data, including endpoint, network, cloud and identity data.

To expand your investigation capabilities, as of Cortex XDR 3.0 the Identity Analytics module will be included with any Cortex XDR Pro licenses with no additional charge.

Enablement of Identity Analyticshas been removed from the Cortex XDR License dialog and relocated to

Settings

Configurations

Cortex XDR Analytics

.

To help you detect suspicious user activity and compromised accounts within your network, Cortex XDR, calculates a User Score based on Incident Scoring Rules and Cortex XDR System Rules that allows you to easily identify the most high-risk users in your organization.

The User Scores are displayed under

Asset Management

User Scores

, providing you with a central location from which you can view and investigate information relating to the user scores.

In addition, Cortex XDR displays the top 5 users with the highest User Scores in a new dashboard widget.

To streamline your incident investigation process, using Identity Analytics capabilities, Cortex XDR now provides a dedicated User View providing easy access when investigating a user in your organization.

The User View automatically aggregates and displays the user details, user score trends, aggregated host logins, and associated incidents and insights.

You can access the User View from right-click pivot menu of the:

To help you analyze correlations of multi-events from multiple sources, Cortex XDR now contains a new XQL-based engine for creating scheduled rules called Correlation Rules. Correlation Rules are accessible in Cortex XDR from the new

Rules

Correlations

menu, which reveals the

Correlation Rules

page.

The following are some of the main features of Correlation Rules.

Cortex XDR now provides as part of the XQL Query Library a new personal query library for saving and managing your own queries. When creating a query in XQL Search or managing your queries from the Query Center, you can now save this query to your personal library using the

Save As

Query to Library

option.

You can also decide whether the query is shared with others (on the same tenant) in their Query Library or make it unshared and only visible by you.

The XQL Query Library contains a powerful search mechanism that enables you to search in any field related to the query, such as the query name, description, creator, query text, and labels. In addition, adding a label to your query enables you to search for these queries using these labels in the XQL Query Library.

To help you better manage your datasets and understand your data storage availability, Cortex XDR has now implemented the following enhancements in the Dataset Management page.

The Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL) now includes a dedicated dataset called

pan_dss_raw

for you to query data related to the Cloud Identity Engine (previously called Directory Sync Service (DSS)), which enables you to leverage Active Directory user, group, and computer information in Cortex XDR.

The Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL) now supports the ingestion of connect and disconnect events of USB devices that are reported by the agent. You can use XQL Search to query for this data and build widgets based on the

xdr_data

dataset, where the following use cases are supported:

Examples of XQL queries that query the USB device data.

For more information, see

Ingest Connect and Disconnect Events of USB Devices

in Device Control.

The Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL) now supports querying for Autonomous System Number (ASN) data in XQL Search. As part of the

xdr_data

dataset, these new fields are available:

action_as_data

and

dst_action_as_data

, which includes this data:

To increase your network visibility, the Palo Alto Network (PANW) firewall can now send GlobalProtect access authentication logs to Cortex XDR. As a result, the Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL) can now support querying for this data using the

xdr_data

dataset in XQL Search.

You can now attach the XQL queries you saved as custom widgets to your report templates.

When editing or creating a report template, you can now attach one or more of your XQL query custom widgets to your report. The XQL query widget is added to the report as a CSV file along with the customized PDF.

Each XQL query widget creates a separate CSV file that you can:

To streamline your incident investigation process and reduce the number of steps it takes to analyze an incident, Cortex XDR has redesigned the Incident View to showcase and navigate across all incident data in one dedicated page.

The enhanced Incidents page capabilities now allow you to investigate and manage incidents without the need to pivot to other pages. The Incident page is now divided into two main sections, Left Pane Incident List and Details Pane.

The incident Resolved statuses have been updated to allow for greater flexibility. As of Cortex XDR 3.0, the Resolved status resolution reason

Resolved - Threat Handled

has been deprecated and replaced with

Resolved - True Positive

. Incidents with

Resolved - Threat Handled

status will not be changed and are still available to search, but will no longer be available as a status resolution reason.

In addition, Cortex XDR created a new resolution reason

Resolved - Security Testing

.

Cortex XDR introduces a new predefined dashboard for Security Operations Center (SOC) Manager to help you better visualize and manage the Cortex XDR incident findings.

The

Security Admin Dashboard

displays the following new widgets:

When viewing listed alerts as you investigate incidents, Cortex XDR now provides a centric view for a single alert, each accessible from a dedicated panel that opens when you click on the specific row of an alert. These dedicated panel views provide you with various details about the alert, such as timestamp, name, description, detected action, MITRE information, host information, and rule information.

To enhance the quick actions available in Cortex XDR, Cortex XDR has now added the quick actionscapability to the following tables:

The new icons are available in table rows upon a left-click of the row and provide an alternative to the right-click pivot menus.

You now have the option to create more granular Behavioral Threat Protection (BTP) exceptions for BTP alerts. These new additional BTP exceptions include the following Causality Group Owner (CGO) attributes:

All previous BTP exception options are still available as usual.

To help you investigate the children of a process node in a Causality View, when right-clicking the Process node to view the Children table, Cortex XDR now displays the Process Start Time field indicating when each child process started.

To help you identify and retrieve information of unmanaged assets in your network, you can now configure in your Windows Agent Profile a Cortex XDR agent scan of your endpoints using Ping that provides updated identifiers of your network assets, such as IP addresses and OS platforms. The scan is automatically distributed by Cortex XDR to all the agents configured in the profile and cannot be initiated by request.

The scan results can be viewed in the Asset Management table.

You can now filter the following Endpoint Administration fields:

When investigating an IP address, in the IP view, the default aggregation has been adjusted to display information on whether the IP address is an internal or external IP address.

For external IP addresses, the default Connection Type displayed is incoming, while for the internal IP addresses, the default Connection Type is Outgoing.

To help you track Permission Management changes in the Cortex XDR Gateway, users with Account Admin role permissions can now access the

Cortex XDR Gateway Management Audit Logs

page.

In the

Cortex XDR Gateway

Management Audit Log

page, you can now track the permission auditing actions performed on your CSP accounts. The Management Audit Log table lists the following fields of log information:

Cortex XDR now includes a new editor for creating 3rd party Parsing Rules, which enables you to:

Cortex XDR provides a number of default Parsing Rules that you can easily modify as required. You can access these Parsing Rules by selecting

Configurations

Data Management

Parsing Rules

.

To extend the current data collection offerings, Cortex XDR now provides a new XDR Collectors configuration that is dedicated for on-premises data collection on Windows and Linux machines. The collector includes a dedicated installer, content updates, and policy management via the XDR console in

Configurations

XDR Collectors

.

Cortex XDR can now ingest Amazon S3 logs. To receive logs, configure

Configurations

Data Collection

Collection Integrations

settings for the vendor in Cortex XDR.

As soon as Cortex XDR begins receiving logs, the app automatically creates an Amazon S3 XQL dataset (

aws_s3_raw

). This enables you to search the logs using XQL Search.

Cortex XDR can now ingest Workday reports data. To receive reports data, configure

Configurations

Data Collection

Collection Integrations

settings for the vendor in Cortex XDR.

As soon as Cortex XDR begins receiving data, the app automatically creates a Workday XQL dataset (

workday_workday_raw

) and enables you to search the data using XQL Search. In addition, Cortex XDR will add the workday fields next to each user in the

Key Assets

list in the

Incident View

, and in the

User

node in the

Causality View

of

Identity Analytics

alerts.

Cortex XDR can now ingest ServiceNow CMDB data. To receive data from the ServiceNow CMDB database, configure

Configurations

Data Collection

Collection Integrations

settings for the vendor in Cortex XDR.

As soon as Cortex XDR begins receiving data, the app automatically creates the following ServiceNow CMDB XQL datasets based on the selected table(s) using the format:

servicenow_cmdb_<table name>_raw

. This enables you to search the data using XQL Search.

To help you configure Windows DHCP log ingestion using Elasticsearch Filebeat, Cortex XDR now provides in the Windows DHCP user interface a downloadable

filebeat.yml

file. This Elasticsearch Filebeat default configuration file must be populated with values provided when you configure the

Collection Integrations

settings in Cortex XDR for the Windows DHCP Collector.

To streamline your investigation of multi-event analytics alerts, Cortex XDR now displays a new Analytics Node identifying alerts that include more than one event type.

In the Events Table, Cortex XDR lists all the events associated with the alert according to the event type.

To expand your investigation and analytics capabilities, Cortex XDR now provides predefined Analytics BIOC Rules that raise alerts with different severity levels.

In the Analytics BIOC Rules table, the Severity field now also displays a Multi-Severity flag. Hover over the flag to see the severities defined for the rule.

Now the Cortex XDR host firewall offers improved enforcement capabilities, better policy management, and greater visibility and troubleshooting capabilities into your network:

For more details, refer to the Cortex XDR administrator guide.

To address the threats surfacing with the growing remote workforce in your organization and the growing corporate network boundaries, the new Network Packet Inspection Engine provides coverage already at the network level. By analyzing the network packet data, the Cortex XDR agent can detect malicious behavior, and block or report it back to Cortex XDR.

The new engine leverages both Palo Alto Networks NGFW content rules, and new Cortex XDR content rules created by the Research Team.

To enable this capability, edit your Malware Security Profile settings.

To ensure your network is constantly protected against the latest and newest threats in the wild, the Cortex XDR research team will now start releasing more frequent content updates in-between major content versions. When you enable minor content updates, the Cortex XDR agent receives minor content updates, starting with the next content releases. Otherwise, if you do not wish to deploy minor content updates, your Cortex XDR agents will keep receiving content updates for major releases which usually occur on a weekly basis.

The content version numbering format remains XXX-YYYY, where XXX indicates the version and YYYY indicates the build number. To distinguish between major and minor releases, XXX is rounded up to the nearest ten for every major release, and incremented by one for a minor release. For example, 180-<build_num> and 190-<build_num> are major releases, and 181-<build_num>, 182-<build_num>, and 191-<build_num> are minor releases.

To enable this capability, you need to update the Global Agent Settings for your tenant.

To better manage your anti-malware flow, you can now configure separate actions for files that are unknown to WildFire and files with Benign Low Confidence score. To adjust your settings, refer to the Malware Security Profile settings.

You can now configure your anti-malware flow to automatically quarantine malicious ELF files. To enable this capability, adjust your Malware Security Profile settings.

You can now personalize the Cortex XDR notification pop-up on the endpoint when the user attempts to connect a USB device that is either blocked on the endpoint or allowed in read-only mode.

To enable this, refer to your Agent Settings Profile.

The Cortex XDR agent logs directory is now accessible to privileged users only.

Support is now available for Cortex XDR agents running on Microsoft Azure-based VMs and virtual desktops (WVD or AVD).

The Cortex XDR Gatekeeper Enhancement protection module now provides coverage also for suspicious bundle executions.

Now when a deliberate termination of the agent is detected on the endpoint, an audit log is reported to Cortex XDR.

For optimized performance and reduced bandwidth consumption, ensure you install new agents with the distribution package available for Windows Cortex XDR agents 7.3 and later. Otherwise, if you deploy the agent installer via SCCM, it is recommended to configure the bandwidth you allocate in your organization for the Palo Alto Networks content security updates. Cortex XDR now provides two recommendations, based on the number of agents you want to update (active or future gents), and according to the time frame during which you want the update to complete (within a day or a week). You can choose one of the recommended values or enter one of your own, between 20 - 10000 Mbps.

To adjust your settings, update the Global Agent Settings for your tenant.

To better control the rollout of a new Cortex XDR agent release in your organization, during the first week only a single batch of agents is upgraded. After that, auto-upgrades continue to be deployed across your network in parallel batches as configured.

Cortex XDR now supports setting up an image of a Broker VM on a Nutanix hypervisor (Nutanix AHV 2021) using a QCOW2 image type.

The broker VM now provides a new FTP Collector applet that enables you to monitor and collect logs from files and folders via FTP, FTPS, and SFTP directly to your log repository for query and visualization purposes.

After you activate the FTP Collector applet, you can collect files as datasets (

<Vendor>_<Product>_raw

) by defining the following:

The broker VM now provides a new Files and Folders Collector applet that enables you to monitor and collect logs from files and folders in a network share for a Windows directory, directly to your log repository for query and visualization purposes.

After you activate the

Files and Folders Collector

applet, you can collect files as datasets (

<Vendor>_<Product>_raw

) by defining the following:

The broker VM now provides a new Database Collector applet that enables you to collect data from a client relational database directly to your log repository for query and visualization purposes.

After you activate the Database Collector applet, you can collect data as datasets (

<Vendor>_<Product>_raw

) by defining the following:

The broker VM now provides a new NetFlow Collector applet that enables you to collect logs with flow records from Netflow (Versions 5 and 9) and from IPFIX directly to your log repository for query and visualization purposes.

After you activate the NetFlow Collector applet, you can collect data as XQL datasets (

<Vendor>_<Product>_raw

) by defining the following:

The renewal process for the Windows Event Collector (WEC) certificates are now streamlined to keep you informed of your WEC certificate status and help you avoid any disruption to your WEC data collection. The following improvements are now implemented:

To expand Get Violations API, when running

device_control/get_violations/

:

To expand the Get Incidents API, Cortex XDR now supports

in

operator for the

status

field.

The Resolved status resolution reason

Resolved - Threat Handled

will be deprecated in Cortex XDR version 3.1 and replaced with

Resolved - True Positive

.

Until Cortex XDR 3.1, when running the Update an Incident API, if you enter

Resolved - Threat Handled

in the

status

field, Cortex XDR will return a message notifying of this change.

In addition, you can now enter a new status:

Resolved - Security Testing

.

To expand your investigation and action capabilities, Cortex XDR now allows you to add an optional

incident ID

field to the following APIs so you can track these actions in the Incident View Timeline:

To streamline activation and management of your Cortex XDR tenants, Cortex XDR now operates as a standalone application known as the Cortex XDR Gateway. The Cortex XDR Gateway is where you view and manage existing tenants and tenants available for activation that are allocated to your CSP account. The split from the hub enables you to easily:

To activate and manage permissions, Cortex XDR assigns the Account Admin role to existing CSP Super User accounts. This role cannot be removed or changed through the Cortex XDR Gateway.

To streamline management of your Cortex XDR user and role-based access control (RBAC) permissions, Cortex XDR now allows you to track user permissions, manage existing roles, and create new roles in the Cortex XDR app without the need to log in to the hub.

Cortex XDR now displays the following information in

Configurations

Access Management

:

To help you better manage your user access permissions, the following changes have been made to the Cortex XDR Granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) configurations in the Cortex XDR Gateway and Cortex XDR management console.

To provide continuity for existing roles and privileges, Cortex XDR assigns the updated permissions by default but you now have the option to configure the view and action access independently for both your new and your preexisting roles.

When using multitenancy within the scope of a Cortex XDR tenant, you can now use the Tenant Navigator, which enables you to switch directly to another owned tenant. The tenant navigator includes the following selections:

When you choose a tenant, Cortex XDR pivots your display directly to the main page of the gateway or the main page of the tenant.

To enable easier access to the Quick Launcher, you can now access it from the Cortex XDR top navigation bar as well as from all other navigation menus in the app.

To align the page title with navigation paths in Cortex XDR, the Settings menu (accessible from the gear icon ) is now named

Configurations

.

The Quick Launcher also reflects the name change.

The Cortex XDR management console now provides enhanced security settings for user sessions. These security settings include the following categories:

For more detailed information, see the Cortex XDR Administrator's Guide.

The XQL Search and Query Builder are now the main search options in Cortex XDR and provide more flexibility and powerful querying capabilities. The Native Search option is deprecated and, as a result:

After Cortex XDR introduced network collection events, that are stitched across endpoints and the Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewalls logs, there is no longer need to support raw

Network

events. Starting with the next Cortex XDR release,

Network

events will be deprecated. In light of the upcoming change, Palo Alto Networks encourages you to define BIOC rules and/or searches by using

Network Connections

in the Query Builder. When searching in XQL, you should avoid using the

xdr_agent_network

preset and use the

newtork_story

preset instead.

All entries that are accumulated in the Cortex XDR audit logs are now available for your retrospective review for an extended period of one year from the date of their creation.

For increased visibility into policy configuration changes, Cortex XDR introduces new policy audit logs for the Create, Edit, Reorder, Update, and Delete Subtypes. The new policy audit logs include:

For improved accuracy, Cortex XDR now logs Extensions Policy and Profile actions under Extensions Policy Rules or Extensions Profile type

This change applies to future audit logs. Previously-created audit logs retain their current descriptions. For more information on Cortex XDR auditing, see Monitor Administrative Activity.

You can now view the specifics of what has changed in the configuration of your policies by viewing the management audit logs. For each policy log, you can view the detailed changes instead of the previously displayed message (

Policy rules were updated.

). Hover with the pointer over the specific entry to view the info in a tooltip. This enables you to know exactly what has changed and, if necessary, roll back the change.

To improve your investigation capabilities, Cortex XDR now includes the Incident ID value in the Management Audit logs when you perform an action on a single incident. The following list displays examples of the updates by log subtype:

To maintain consistency, Cortex XDR has updated the following management audit log for change in status of Threat Handled incidents:

When you rerun the host-insights data collection scan, either from the

Vulnerability Management

endpoints view or from the

Asset View

, Cortex XDR now uses the same management audit log types as follows:

This change applies to future audit logs. Previously-created audit logs retain their current descriptions. For more information on Cortex XDR auditing, see Monitor Administrative Activity

The Cortex XDR management console now enables you to view audit logs for Create, Edit, and Delete operations of Rules Exceptions. In addition, the existing management audit logs for import and export of Rules Exceptions are now logged under the Rules Exceptions type.

The Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL) can now support data provided in multiple languages, such as in XQL queries, lookups, widgets, and external data ingestion.

The Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL) now includes the following new datasets called

endpoints

and

host_inventory

. These datasets support dataset permission enforcements in the Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL), Query Center, and XQL Widgets. To view or access any of these datasets, you need role-based access control (RBAC) permissions to the Endpoint Administration and Host Inventory views.

To streamline the way usernames appear in network events and alerts, Cortex XDR now processes and displays usernames in the following standardized format, also termed “normalized user”:

In the Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL), every user field included in the raw data, for network, authentication, and login events, has an equivalent normalized user field associated with it that displays the user information in the standardized format. For example, the

login_data

field has the

login_data_dst_normalized_user

field to display the content in the standardized format. We recommend that you use these

normalized_user

fields when building your queries to ensure the most accurate results.

As a result, any alert triggered based on network, authentication, or login events, now displays the

User Name

in the new standardized format in the Alerts and

Incidents

pages. This change impacts every alert for Cortex XDR Analytics and Cortex XDR Analytics BIOC, including BIOC and IOC alerts triggered on one of these event types.

The Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL) now includes a new stage command that enables you to associate the IPv4 address of any field to a list of predefined attributes related to the geolocation. To support this, you can now add the iploc stage to your queries using the format:

iploc

<field name>

The Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL) now includes a new stage command that enables you to group events by quantity or time span. The most common use case is for time charts.

To support this feature, you can now add the bin stage command to your queries using these formats depending on whether you are grouping by quantity or time span:

The Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL) now includes a new configuration function that enables you to perform searches within a specific time frame from the query execution. To support this feature, you can now add the config stage command to your queries with the timeframe function using these formats:

EDR data collected for Linux now contains Linux system authentication logs. These Linux system authentication logs are now available using XQL queries and the Query Builder. As a result, in the Query Builder, the

Event Log

now includes both Windows and Linux event logs and the corresponding

event_type

in XQL has been renamed from

WINDOWS_EVENT_LOG

to

EVENT_LOG

.

To help you better view and visualize data based on XQL search queries, Cortex XDR expanded the type of available widgets so that you can now display the search results using:

To keep incidents fresh and relevant, Cortex XDR now provides the following two new thresholds after which an incident stops adding alerts:

After the incident reaches either threshold, it stops accepting alerts and Cortex XDR groups subsequent related alerts in a new incident.

For increased visibility, Cortex XDR also provides a new

Alerts Grouping Status

field in the Incidents table to identify the grouping status:

Enabled

when the incident is open to accepting new related alerts or

Disabled

if either threshold is reached and the incident is closed to further alerts or if the incident reached the 1,000 alert limit. To view the exact reason for a Disabled status, you can hover over the status field.

You can now view the following MITRE, severity, and alert grouping fields in the Incident Table.

Each field displays the following information:

To streamline your incident investigation process and reduce the number of steps it takes to investigate an incident, Cortex XDR now allows you to display the Incidents page in one of two new views:

The List view displays the current table. The new Detail view positions the incident table rows in a left-side pane and displays the complete

Incident View

on the remaining of the page allowing you to scroll through the incident rows and display each incident view without the need to pivot to another tab or window.

To ensure visibility of the incident data, each row in the pane displays the incident description and incorporates icons that provide the following details:

In addition, you can sort the incident rows according to the available fields.

The current right-click menu options are also available in the Detail view.

To improve loading time, as of Cortex XDR version 2.9, when navigating to the Causality View from an alert or event, Cortex XDR now displays the causality data as follows:

The Cortex XDR management console now allows you to view the observed behaviors of Behavioral Threat Protection alerts. To view the observed behaviors, right-click on an alert in the alert table or in the incident view and select

View Observed Behaviors

.

To streamline the investigation process and better highlight alerts that are significant to you, Cortex XDR now includes

Active Directory Groups

and

Organizational Unit

(OU) as optional Featured Alert Fields labels.

Define a Featured AD or OU in

Investigation

Incident Management

Feature Fields

Active Directory

.

To easily locate alerts containing featured AD or OU fields, in the

Alerts Table

, alerts are flagged in the

Alert Name

field with a flag and appear in the

Contains Featured User

or

Contains Featured Host

fields associated with the AD/OU.

To better identify and deduplicate Analytics, IOC or BIOC alerts for the same activity, the deduplication period is now calculated according to the actual time the event took place, rather than according to the time the event was reported to Cortex XDR.

This change applies to future alerts. Previously-created alerts remain the same.

To streamline investigation in Cortex XDR, you can quickly initiate actions using new icons that are available in throughout Cortex XDR. The new icons are available in table rows upon a left click of the row and provide an alternative to the right-click pivot menus.

The new icons are available for rows in the following tables:

To streamline your investigation under Vulnerability Assessment, Cortex XDR now provides a centric view for a single CVE, Endpoint, and Application, each accessible when you click on a specific row of the Vulnerability Assessment and Host Insights panels. These views list the affected applications, endpoints, or applied vulnerabilities, in an exportable and searchable manner, together with additional information on each entity.

The CVEs tab under Vulnerability Assessment now includes additional fields to better fine-tune your vulnerability investigation. This includes:

Other view enhancements:

In addition, Cortex XDR now calculates an unlimited number of vulnerabilities per endpoint, as opposed to a limit of 500 vulnerabilities per endpoint in previous versions.

The Cortex XDR management console now displays Behavioral Threat Protection (BTP) alerts at Low or Informational severity. These are displayed as Insights in the

Incident View

and the

Causality View

panels. Low severity alerts are also displayed in the Alerts table.

Starting with this release, Cortex XDR includes Linux authentication logs in authentication stories and will generate alerts accordingly.

If you use Zscaler Cloud Firewall in your network, you can now forward your firewall and network logs to Cortex XDR for analysis. This enables you to take advantage of Cortex XDR anomalous behavior detection and investigation capabilities. To begin analyzing your traffic logs, you set up a Syslog Collector and configure your firewall to forward logs to the Syslog Collector. To provide seamless log ingestion, Cortex XDR automatically maps the fields in your traffic logs to the Cortex XDR log format.

As soon as Cortex XDR begins receiving logs, the app automatically creates a Zscaler XQL dataset (

<Vendor>

_

<Product>

_raw

) based on the

<Vendor>

and

<Product>

fields defined on the Zscaler syslog configuration. This enables you to search the logs using XQL Search.

To provide additional network asset visibility in Cortex XDR

Asset Management

and improved analytics, Cortex XDR can now ingest Windows DHCP logs. To receive logs, configure

Configurations

Data Collection

Collection Integrations

settings for the vendor in Cortex XDR, which replaces the preexisting

Settings

SaaS Integrations

settings. In addition, you must install and configure an Elasticsearch Filebeat agent on your Windows DHCP Server.

As soon as Cortex XDR begins receiving logs, the app automatically creates a Windows DHCP XQL dataset (

microsoft_dhcp_raw

). This enables you to search the logs using XQL Search.

The Syslog Collector applet now includes these enhancements:

When you ingest alerts from external sources using either the Syslog Collector or Cortex XDR API, you can now map these additional optional fields to the alerts table:

To expand your investigation and analytics capabilities, Cortex XDR now ingests any field with a null value, as opposed to the previous behavior of not ingesting these null value fields. It is also now possible to use the Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL) to query ingestion rules for null values.

Starting with this release, WildFire introduces analysis scores for files with Benign verdict to indicate the level of confidence WildFire has in the Benign verdict. For example, a file by a trusted signer or a file that was tested manually would get a high confidence Benign score, whereas a file that did not display any suspicious behavior at the time of testing would get a lower confidence Benign score. Files with a low confidence score are displayed as Benign Low Confidence (LC).

When Cortex XDR receives a Benign Low Confidence verdict, the agent enforces the Malware Security profile settings you currently have in place (Run local analysis to determine the file verdict, Allow, or Block).

To expand your investigation capabilities, Cortex XDR now offers a new Identity Analytics add-on module. The add-on requires a Cortex XDR Pro per TB license and a separate module license. The module license is currently free, however will entail an additional cost in the future.

The Identity Analytics add-on displays in the

Analytics Alert View

suspicious user activity such as stolen or misused credentials, lateral movement, credential harvesting, or brute-force data collected by the Cortex XDR Analytics engine detectors.

When investigating an analytics type alert, a new

User

node appears in the causality view. Hover over the node to display user profile information, such as recent authentication statistics, user role, and if associated with Active Directory groups or Organizational Units. When selecting the alert node, in the

Alert Description

and

Event Table

sections, Cortex XDR displays the recent logins, hosts, alerts, and process executions associated with the user.

To ensure the analytics detectors raise alerts efficiently and do not overcrowd your Alerts table, Cortex XDR automatically disables alerts from detectors that reach 5000 or more hits over a 24 hour period.

To reduce the network load and time typically required for the initial roll-out or major upgrades of the Cortex XDR agent, Cortex XDR now offers an agent installation and content update package. The package includes the agent installer and the latest supported content available at the time of the bundle download, eliminating the Content Update download phase from the Cortex XDR Server post agent installation.You can deploy the package using a third party tool such as SCCM, or manually on the endpoint.

For more information on the installation process, refer to the Cortex XDR Agent administrator guide.

To reduce external bandwidth usage and time required for Cortex XDR agent installations, upgrades, and content updates, Cortex XDR now offers an additional option to cache the files on your Cortex XDR Broker VM.

When both P2P and Broker VM download sources are selected, the agent first queries a peer agent for the files. If the files are unavailable or the process fails, the agent queries the Broker VM where the files are stored for a 30-days retention period since an agent last asked for them. If the download from the Broker VM fails as well, the agent retrieves the files directly from the Cortex XDR server. The option to retrieve the files from the Server is always enabled.

To enable the Broker VM caching option, you must first:

For the detailed workflow on how to set up caching on the Broker VM, refer to the Cortex XDR administrator’s guide.

To reduce bandwidth load when distributing installers from Cortex XDR to the Cortex XDR agents, Cortex XDR now leverages P2P distribution to include agent installers, in addition to content updates. In your Agent Settings profile, you can choose the download source from which agents retrieve release upgrades and content updates: P2P, Palo Alto Networks Broker VM, and the Cortex XDR server. Peer-to-peer distribution is enabled by default in the Agent Settings profile, and requires that you enable UDP and TCP over port 33221 (You can change this port number later on through the Agent Settings profile).

When the Cortex XDR agent starts enforcing Device Control on the endpoint, it now enforces the policy rules not only on newly connected devices, but also on devices that were previously connected to the endpoint before the policy enforcement was applied.

Starting with this release, you can install the Cortex XDR agent on macOS based devices with Apple Silicon (M1). To resolve issues that could occur, refer to the Cortex XDR 7.4 agent list of known issues.

Now when the Cortex XDR Gatekeeper Enhancement security module raises an alert, you can create a global exception for this specific source-child combination only, while allowing Cortex XDR to continue enforcing the Gatekeeper Enhancement protection module on the source process running other child processes.

For more details, see Add a Global Endpoint Policy Exception.

Starting with this release, when you uninstall the Cortex XDR agent from the Cortex XDR management console, the process is silent and does not prompt the end-user for approvals on the endpoint.

Cortex XDR now enables assignment of user permissions to specific endpoint groups in the organization. By default, all users have management access to all endpoints in the tenant. However, after you (as an administrator) assign a management scope to a Cortex XDR user, the user is be able to manage only the specific endpoints within that scope.

This Scope-Based Access Control (SBAC) affects the following functional areas in Cortex XDR:

The rest of the functional areas and their permissions in Cortex XDR do not support SBAC. Accordingly, if these permissions are granted to a scoped user, the user will be able to access all endpoints in the tenant within this functional area. For example, a scoped user with a permission to view incidents, can view all incidents in the system without limitation to a scope.

To view and modify the scope of a user, go to

Configurations

Access Management

Users

In the list of Cortex XDR users, the Endpoint Scope column now specifies any SBAC assignment.

The broker VM now provides a new CSV Collector applet that enables you to monitor and collect CSV log files from a shared Windows directory directly to your log repository for query and visualization purposes.

After you activate the CSV Collector applet, you can ingest CSV files as datasets by defining the list of folders mounted to the broker VM and setting the list of CSV files to monitor and upload to Cortex XDR using a username and password.

You can now specify a proxy listening interface when activating a local agent on the broker VM, through the Activate Local Agent applet. For more information, see the Cortex XDR Administrator’s Guide.

To expand your investigation capabilities, Cortex XDR now enables you to run XQL queries on your data sources using APIs. The XQL APIs require a Cortex XDR Pro license and a daily Query Quota made up of query units. Cortex XDR provides a free quota of query units and you will be able to purchase additional units in future Cortex XDR versions.

Each XQL query consumes query units based on the number of API response results. Queries called without enough quota will fail.

You can run the following APIs on your tenant and MSSP child tenants:

To help you track your XQL APIs, in the Cortex XDR app, you can view the following information:

For an added layer of security when managing your user API permissions, you can now set a time limitation on the API key used to authenticate API calls.

When creating API keys, select the option to enable an

Expiration Date

for the key. In the

API Keys

table, a new

Expiration Time

field has been added allowing you to track each key.In addition, Cortex XDR displays an API Key Expiration notification one week and one day prior to the defined expiration date.

To help you gain greater visibility of requested API data when calling Get Incidents and Get Extra Incident Data APIs, the response section now includes the following fields:

To ensure consistency in the Cortex XDR app Alerts table, when calling Insert Parsed Alerts API, the

severity

filed is now mandatory and does not accept the value

Unknown

.

Possible valid values are:

To expand your Featured Alert Field capabilities, Cortex XDR has updated the Replace Featured Active Directory Groups

Replace Featured Active Directory Groups

API to allow you to delete and replace Organizational Unit (OU) in addition to Active Directory Groups (AD).

When calling

/replace_ad_groups/

, you can now distinguish between an AD or OU group by including the new field

type

with a value of either

group

or

OU

in your request. The field is not mandatory and is sent, by default, as

group

.

When you connect to a broker VM remotely, Cortex XDR now allows you to perform the following privileged commands:

Cortex XDR now displays a notification when you log in to your tenant following a Cortex XDR version upgrade. The notification displays the updated version number and lists selected new features available for your license type.

From the notification, you can choose to pivot to the

Release Notes

for more information or you can dismiss the notification and view at another time by navigating to

User

What’s new

in the Cortex XDR management console.

To improve your investigation capabilities, Cortex XDR now includes the SHA256 value in the Management Audit and Agent Audit logs for files that you restored and quarantined.

The Management Audit Log and Agent Audit Log

Description

field in the Cortex XDR management console and the Get Audit Agent Report and the Get Audit Management Log APIs now display the file

Description

in a new format:

The Auto-Disabled behavioral indicator of compromise (BIOC) rule

Description

field displayed in the Management Audit Log page and the Get Audit Management Log API now display the rule

description

in a new format:

The Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL) is extended in the following ways:

Cortex XDR now enables you to query the following data using the Cortex XDR Query Language (XQL):

In addition, log records received from a security information and event management (SIEM) system are parsed into key-value pairs. Log record field values that are not identified as an integer, string, or timestamp are ingested as a JSON record.

The Network preset for XQL Search of EDR data is changed—it is now Agent Network. This is only a name change; this preset still provides the same network events sent from agents as before this change.

The Agent Network preset is not the same as the Network Story preset that provides stitched network events from different sources.

To continue investigation, you can now pivot from XQL Search results to the Causality View and Timeline View. These options are supported for results that identify the following types of events: process (except for those with an event subtype of termination), network, file, registry, injection, load image, system calls, network stories, and Windows event logs.

From the events table in the Causality View and Timeline View, you can similarly pivot from an event to

View in XQL

in either the same tab or a new tab. This can be useful if you want to further refine the query to continue investigation.

To help you better view and visualize data based on XQL search queries, you can now view your XQL search results in three new modes:

Cortex XDR expanded the type of available widgets so that you can now display the search results using:

To easily save a visualization after you create a widget, find the widget in the Widget Library.

To streamline widget visibility and management, Cortex XDR now enables you to search, view, and edit both your custom widgets and the Cortex XDR predefined widgets in the new Widget Library.

The library is a one-stop page where you can easily add or create widgets to your dashboards and reports to help you continuously monitor your XQL query results, logs, and data visually.

To streamline the investigation process and better highlight incidents that are significant in your environment, Cortex XDR now enables you to define custom incident scoring rules that prioritize your incidents according to the needs of your organization.

Define scoring rules in the Cortex XDR management console on the

Investigations

Incident Management

page. Each rule is based on a defined score, an Alert attribute, or the entity on which it occurred. When an alert matching the defined rule is raised, Cortex XDR adds the alert score to the total score of the incident. By default, the alert score is applied only to the first alert that matches the defined rule. Subsequent alerts for the same incident do not receive any score.

The incident score is displayed as a filterable

Score

field in the Incident table and as a tag in the Incident View.

To streamline the investigation process and better highlight alerts that are significant to you, Cortex XDR now enables you to label specific alert attributes as Featured Alert Fields.

Featured fields help you track alerts that involve a specific:

Label a field as Featured in

Investigation

Incident Management

Feature Alert Fields

and then filter and sort alerts containing the featured fields in the Alerts Table using the new table fields:

To easily locate alerts containing featured fields, alerts containing one or more of the featured fields are flagged in the

Alert Name

field with a flag.

Alert notification emails now include whether the alert contains one or more featured fields:

To help you investigate the time frame of security processes and connections made over your network, Cortex XDR now displays the network event timestamp in the Network Causality View.

When selecting the Network Appliance node in the Network Causality View, the event timestamp is now displayed in the Entity Data section of the card.

To enhance your investigation capabilities, you can now narrow the

Timestamp

field results in the Cortex XDR tables by right-clicking to display rows that are 30 days before or 30 days after the selected field value.

The Events table (available from the Causality View and Timeline View) now includes the following enhancements:

Hostname visibility in the Cortex XDR Alerts Table is now displayed according to the following guidelines:

The Native Search will remain available from the Query Builder only until the next release.

When the Cortex XDR agent identifies a remote network connection that attempts to perform malicious activity—such as encrypt endpoint files—the agent can now block the IP address to close all existing communication and block new connections from this IP address to the endpoint.

You can view the list of all blocked IP addresses per endpoint from the Cortex XDR

Action Center

, as well as unblock them to re-enable communication as appropriate. You set the action mode in your Malware Security profile where you can also add a specific and known safe IP address or IP address range to the IP addresses allow list. This capability is supported for network connections made in IPv4 only.

Note the following limitations:

Cortex XDR can now ingest logs from PingFederate. To receive logs, you must enable PingFederate to send logs in CEF format to the Syslog Collector that you set up on the broker VM.

As soon as Cortex XDR begins receiving logs, the app automatically creates a PingFederate XQL dataset (

ping_identity_pingfederate_raw

) and enables you to search the logs using XQL Search. Log information from PingFederate is also visible, when relevant, in the

xdr_data

dataset and in the

authentication_story

preset.

Cortex XDR can now ingest Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail Logs. To receive logs, configure

SaaS Log Collection

settings for the vendor in Cortex XDR.

As soon as Cortex XDR begins receiving logs, the app automatically creates an Amazon AWS XQL dataset (

amazon_aws_raw

) and enables you to search the logs using XQL Search.

When you use Elasticsearch Filebeat to log activity on your endpoints or servers, Cortex XDR can now ingest those file logs. To receive logs, configure the collection settings for Filebeat in Cortex XDR and the output settings in your Filebeat installations.

As soon as Cortex XDR begins receiving logs, Cortex XDR automatically creates a dataset for each collected vendor and product and makes logs available in XQL Search queries.

You can now set up an HTTP Log Collector to receive logs in text or JSON format. To begin receiving logs you must first set up the HTTP Log Collector and use the provided examples to construct an HTTP POST request.

As soon as Cortex XDR begins receiving logs, Cortex XDR automatically creates a dataset using the vendor and product you specified during the log collector setup. You can then use XQL Search to initiate queries on the dataset.

As an alternative to setting up a GCP Pub/Sub, Cortex XDR can now ingest container logs from Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) using Elasticsearch Filebeat. To receive logs, you must install Filebeat on your containers and enable SaaS Log Collection settings for Filebeat.

As soon as Cortex XDR begins receiving logs, the app automatically creates a GKE XQL dataset—using the product and vendor that you specify during Filebeat setup—and enables you to search the logs using XQL Search.

Cortex XDR extends log ingestion support to vendors sending LEEF over Syslog. As with log ingestion for CEF over Syslog, you can configure the protocol, the IP address and port, and the format settings for the syslog collector.

After Cortex XDR begins receiving logs from the third-party source, it automatically parses the logs in LEEF format and creates a dataset. Cortex XDR extracts the vendor and product name to identify the dataset as

<vendor>

_

<product>

_raw

. You can then use XQL Search queries to view logs and create new BIOC rules.

If you have Analytics enabled, Cortex XDR now provides visibility into and enables management of your Analytics BIOC rules by pivoting from the BIOC Rules table to a dedicated page.

For each rule, Cortex XDR displays identifying information, such as name and ID, severity, rule activation status, and any relevant MITRE ATT&CK information. Cortex XDR also enables you to disable or enable Analytics BIOC rules as needed.

To view and manage Analytics BIOC rules, you must have the corresponding permissions enabled for your role.

The Local Analysis module, which prevents the execution of malicious Portable Executables (PEs) and Office documents with macros, now includes a new rule-based static engine that provides an additional layer of protection. The new engine provides additional context to Cortex XDR alerts by matching the samples that are under agent examination to static rules that inspect multiple file attributes and features.

The Local Analysis rules are maintained by the Palo Alto Networks Research team and are updated through content updates. You cannot add, modify, or remove rules from the Local Analysis module.

Cortex XDR can now leverage the latest threat research to quickly deploy behavioral threat protection (BTP) rules that detect attempts to load vulnerable drivers. As with other BTP rules, Cortex XDR can deliver changes to vulnerable driver rules with content updates.

To configure vulnerable drivers protection, you must enable

Behavioral Threat Protection

and configure the

Action mode for vulnerable drivers protection

as part of a Malware Security Profile.

By default, Cortex XDR blocks all identified attempts to run vulnerable drivers. If you change the default (

Block

), you can

Report

(and allow) vulnerable drivers or disable the module.

Cortex XDR now extends Device Control for USB devices to include virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The Cortex XDR agent enforces the Device Control policy rules on USB devices after the end user logs on to the VDI instance. USB Devices that were connected prior to the agent enforcing the Device Control policy rules are not blocked after the fact.

Note the following limitations:

For Cortex XDR agents 7.1 and later releases running on unpatched Windows endpoints, a new capability in the Exploit Security profile will modify IP4 and IPv6 settings temporarily on the endpoint as a workaround to protect unpatched endpoints from these known vulnerabilities. After the endpoint is patched with a fix for these vulnerabilities, the Cortex XDR agent automatically reverts all modified Windows system settings to their values before modification.

Before applying this workaround on your endpoints, refer to the Cortex XDR Administrator’s Guide for the full details and impact this workaround could have on your network.

You can now install the Cortex XDR agent on Linux endpoints that are running on:

For all supported kernel versions, see the Latest kernel module version support

To enable multitenant management that uses XQL Query to view raw data that is stored in Cortex XDR, you can now execute XQL queries on a single child tenant or up to 100 child tenants simultaneously directly from your parent tenant XQL Search page.

When executing XQL queries on a single child tenant, Cortex XDR provides the parent tenant with autocompletion and validation capabilities to all datasets available on the child tenant.

When executing XQL queries on multiple child tenants simultaneously:

You can view, track, and investigate the query results and graphs for each child tenant in your XQL Search page results table or Query Center by filtering by child tenant.

MD5 values for broker images version 11.1.1:

To expand the Broker VM data collection capabilities, in addition to the default WEC event IDs, you can now configure the Broker VM to collect all or specific Windows event types, such as DHCP, DNS, and IIS event types, directly from the Cortex XDR management console.

To keep you informed of your WEC Domain Controller Certificate status and avoid service disruptions, Cortex XDR now displays a notification of the remaining time left on your license or whether your license is expired.

When you connect to a broker VM remotely, Cortex XDR now allows you to perform the following privileged commands:

To expand your API capabilities, Cortex XDR now provides the APIs to help you manage your featured alert fields. Using the following APIs you can delete and replace existing featured alert fields:

To help you gain greater visibility of requested API data when calling Get Incidents and Get Extra Incident Data APIs, the response section now includes the following Incident Scoring fields:

To help you gain greater visibility of Alerts that include Featured host name, username, or IP address, the Get Alerts API response now includes the following boolean type fields: