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 of the listed protocol decoders for viruses, and generates alerts for SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 protocols 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 can be used 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 threats are discovered by WildFire, signatures are quickly created and then integrated into the standard Antivirus signatures that can be downloaded by Threat Prevention subscribers on a daily basis (sub-hourly for WildFire subscribers).