PAN-OS 6.0: Raising the Bar in the Fight Against Advanced Threats

Today Palo Alto Networks announced the availability of PAN-OS 6.0, and with it another major milestone in our commitment to defend enterprises, service providers and governments from the most advanced cyber threats.  At the center of our enterprise security strategy is an innovative platform, powered by PAN-OS, that provides breakthrough protection from the data center to the network perimeter, as well as the distributed enterprise. With over 60 new features now available in this release there is quite literally something for everyone.

As you read through the feature overview you’ll see two dominant themes emerge.  First, we continue to invest heavily in exposing new evasion tactics used by attackers to avoid detection. A clear example can be seen with the enhancements made to WildFire, which protects our customers from unknown malware, and zero-day exploits across nearly 400 different applications. Detecting these threats requires that you inspect all traffic – regardless of the port it’s transmitting through, the protocol used, or whether it’s encrypted, which we estimate constitutes as much as 20-30% of enterprise traffic today.

Second, it should go without saying that the intelligence gathered during detection must be closely integrated with your defenses and shared globally, such that previously unknown attack patterns can never be repeated.

Here are some of the highlights:

• PAN-OS 6.0 expands WildFire’s dynamic analysis to include all major file types including Android APK, Java, PDF, PE and Microsoft Office.  Inspection can be performed against fully emulated Windows XP and Windows 7 environments with granular reporting and analysis tools to help expedite incident response.
• PAN-OS 6.0 adds new DNS analysis and monitoring techniques to identify previously unknown command-and-control (C&C) servers, as well as infected hosts operating within your enterprise.  C&C intelligence is routed back to our Threat Prevention and URL Filtering subscription service to block any future communication and quickly remediate existing infections.

Be sure to check out the full breadth of this release at our What’s New in PAN-OS 6.0 feature page.  We’ll detail all of the enhancements made across the platform including VM-Series, GlobalProtect, and Panorama. PAN-OS 6.0 will be available the week of January 20th.