Antivirus profiles protect against viruses, worms, and trojans as well as spyware downloads. Using a stream-based malware prevention engine, which inspects traffic the moment the first packet is received, the Palo Alto Networks antivirus solution can provide protection for clients without significantly impacting the performance of the firewall. This profile scans for a wide variety of malware in executables, PDF files, HTML and JavaScript viruses, including support for scanning inside compressed files and data encoding schemes. If you have enabled Decryption on the firewall, the profile also enables scanning of decrypted content.

The default profile inspects all the listed protocol decoders for viruses, and generates alerts for SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 while blocking for FTP, HTTP, and SMB protocols. You can configure the action for a decoder or antivirus signature and specify how the firewall responds to a threat event:

Customized profiles help to minimize antivirus inspection for traffic between trusted security zones, and to maximize the inspection of traffic received from untrusted zones, such as the internet, as well as the traffic sent to highly sensitive destinations, such as server farms.

The Palo Alto Networks WildFire system also provides signatures for persistent threats that are more evasive and have not yet been discovered by other antivirus solutions. As WildFire discovers threats, signatures are quickly created and then integrated into the standard antivirus signatures that can be downloaded by Threat Prevention subscribers daily (subhourly for WildFire subscribers).

Anti-Spyware profiles blocks spyware on compromised hosts from trying to phone-home or beacon out to external command and control (C2) servers, allowing you to detect malicious traffic leaving the network from infected clients. You can apply various levels of protection between zones. For example, you might want to have custom Anti-Spyware profiles that minimize inspection between trusted zones, while maximizing inspection on traffic received from an untrusted zone, such as internet-facing zones. When the firewall is managed by a Panorama management server, the ThreatID is mapped to the corresponding custom threat on the firewall to enable the firewall to generate a Threat log populated with the configured custom ThreatID.

You can define your own custom Anti-Spyware profiles, or choose one of the following predefined profiles when applying Anti-Spyware to a Security policy rule:

When the firewall detects a threat event, you can configure the following actions in an Anti-Spyware profile:

In addition, you can enable the DNS sinkholing action in Anti-Spyware profiles to enable the firewall to forge a response to a DNS query for a known malicious domain, causing the malicious domain name to resolve to an IP address that you define. This feature helps to identify infected hosts on the protected network using DNS traffic. Infected hosts can then be easily identified in the traffic and Threat logs because any host that attempts to connect to the sinkhole IP address is most likely infected with malware.

Anti-Spyware and Vulnerability Protection profiles are configured similarly.

Vulnerability Protection profiles stop attempts to exploit system flaws or gain unauthorized access to systems. While Anti-Spyware profiles help identify infected hosts as traffic leaves the network, Vulnerability Protection profiles protect against threats entering the network. For example, Vulnerability Protection profiles help protect against buffer overflows, illegal code execution, and other attempts to exploit system vulnerabilities. The default Vulnerability Protection profile protects clients and servers from all known critical, high, and medium-severity threats. You can also create exceptions, which allow you to change the response to a specific signature. When the firewall is managed by a Panorama management server, the ThreatID is mapped to the corresponding custom threat on the firewall to enable the firewall to generate a Threat log populated with the configured custom ThreatID.

When the firewall detects a threat event, you can configure the following actions in a Vulnerability Protection profile:

URL filtering profiles enable you to monitor and control how users access the web over HTTP and HTTPS. The firewall comes with a default profile configured to block websites such as known malware sites, phishing sites, and adult content sites. You can use the default profile in a Security policy rule, clone it to be used as a starting point for new URL Filtering profiles, or add a new URL profile that will have all categories set to allow for visibility into the traffic on your network. You can then customize the newly added URL profiles and add lists of specific websites that should always be blocked or allowed, which provides more granular control over URL categories.

Data filtering profiles prevent sensitive information such as credit card or social security numbers from leaving a protected network. The data filtering profile also allows you to filter on key words, such as a sensitive project name or the word confidential. It is important to focus your profile on the desired file types to reduce false positives. For example, you might only want to search Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. You might also only want to scan web-browsing traffic, or FTP.

You can create custom data pattern objects and attach them to a Data Filtering profile to define the type of information on which you want to filter. Create data pattern objects based on:

To get started, see Data Filtering.

The firewall uses file blocking profiles to block specified file types over specified applications and in the specified session flow direction (inbound/outbound/both). You can set the profile to alert or block on upload or download and you can specify which applications are subject to the file blocking profile. You can also configure custom block pages that will appear when a user attempts to download the specified file type. This allows the user to take a moment to consider whether or not they want to download a file.

You can define your own custom File Blocking profiles, or choose one of the following predefined profiles when applying file blocking to a Security policy rule. The predefined profiles, which are available with content release version 653 and later, allow you to quickly enable best practice file blocking settings:

Configure a file blocking profile with the following actions:

To get started, Set Up File Blocking.

Use a WildFire Analysis profile to enable the firewall to forward unknown files or email links for WildFire analysis. Specify files to be forwarded for analysis based on application, file type, and transmission direction (upload or download). Files or email links matched to the profile rule are forwarded to either the WildFire public cloud or the WildFire private cloud (hosted with a WF-500 appliance), depending on the analysis location defined for the rule. If a profile rule is set to forward files to the WildFire public cloud, the firewall also forwards files that match existing antivirus signatures, in addition to unknown files.

You can also use the WildFire Analysis profiles to set up a WildFire hybrid cloud deployment. If you are using a WF-500 appliance to analyze sensitive files locally (such as PDFs), you can specify for less sensitive file types (such as PE files) or file types that are not supported for WF-500 appliance analysis (such as APKs), to be analyzed by the WildFire public cloud. Using both the WildFire appliance and the WildFire cloud for analysis allows you to benefit from a prompt verdict for files that have already been processed by the cloud, and for files that are not supported for appliance analysis, and frees up the appliance capacity to process sensitive content.

DoS Protection profiles provide detailed control for Denial of Service (DoS) Protection policy rules. DoS policy rules allow you to control the number of sessions between interfaces, zones, addresses, and countries based on aggregate sessions or source and/or destination IP addresses. There are two DoS protection mechanisms that the Palo Alto Networks firewalls support.

You can enable both types of protection mechanisms in a single DoS Protection profile.

The DoS Protection profile is used to specify the type of action to take and details on matching criteria for the DoS policy rule. The DoS Protection profile defines settings for SYN, UDP, and ICMP floods, can enable resource protection and defines the maximum number of concurrent connections. After you configure the DoS Protection profile, you then attach it to a DoS policy rule.

When configuring DoS protection, it is important to analyze your environment to set the correct thresholds and due to some of the complexities of defining DoS Protection policy rules, this guide will not go into detailed examples.

Zone Protection Profiles provide additional protection between specific network zones to protect the zones against attack. The profile must be applied to the entire zone, so it is important to carefully test the profiles to prevent issues that might arise with the normal traffic traversing the zones. When defining packets per second (pps) threshold limits for Zone Protection profiles, the threshold is based on the packets per second that do not match a previously established session.