Nir at RSA 2013

Just like in years past, Nir is presenting in the Palo Alto Networks booth (#931) at the RSA Conference this week. We love that our founder and CTO is so passionate and engaged, and while we don’t want to give away what he's discussing (we want you to come to booth to see and hear his preso for yourself), we do want to share a taste for those of you not at RSA this year.

Nir focuses on laying out a basic network attack from the hacker’s perspective and discusses how network security should combat these attacks. He first shares his knowledge with attendees by revealing the most common four steps of an attack:

Bait the end-user. This begins with spear phishing. Attackers target users to gather personal information. These attackers typically turn to websites like LinkedIn to send emails that contain links to websites that are infected with malware.

Exploit the vulnerability. After the user opens the link an exploit is sent to the attacker that allows them to access this users' network. For example, a user downloads and opens an infected .pdf.

Download a back door program. By downloading an executable, now the attacker has a back door program command and control channel for them to be able to tell them what to do.

Establish a back channel. Communicating and accessing the server while no one knows is the final step.

Nir continues by discussing how he believes that many in the industry don't truly understand malware. There are simply too many different steps by using multivendors. Nir believes the firewall is the core and we're headed toward a single vendor future - one vendor, one cloud, one solution.

To meet this challenge, Palo Alto Networks has developed WildFire, which provides the ability to identify malicious behaviors in executable files by running them in a virtual environment and observing their behaviors. To read more about our malware detection and prevention service, click here.

Or if you're attending RSA, come to our booth and receive a demo. And, of course, don't forget to come and hear Nir's presentation. He'll be speaking at 1:00pm and 5:00pm today and 11:30am tomorrow. We hope to see you this week!