Our recently released PAN-OS 8.0 offers scalable prevention through automation, speed and accuracy. It builds on the powerful capabilities of the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform and empowers financial institutions to prevent today’s advanced threats with better integration and information sharing across the network, endpoints and cloud. This is achieved through automated workflows and security with fast and precise protections that are generated and shared globally.
PAN-OS 8.0 has a number of specific enhancements that security and risk professionals within the financial services industry may find particularly interesting.
Phishing continues to be a highly effective technique to steal user credentials for illicit purposes. Specific to the financial services industry, the theft and subsequent use of these credentials has been reported as a key factor in the fraudulent transfers perpetuated at a number of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) member institutions over the past 18 months. Similarly, credential theft likely played a role in the delivery of ATM malware via the internal networks of multiple banks across Asia and Europe over the past year. Consequently, the prevention of phishing attacks and the protection of user credentials are key priorities for security professionals.
With these additional capabilities in PAN-OS 8.0, financial institutions can better protect their critical and sensitive resources from account takeover (ATO) attacks that use compromised simple or single-factor authentication credentials.
Advanced attackers are increasingly using stealthy, persistent methods to evade traditional security measures. Such advanced persistent threats (APT) typically target specific users and/or vulnerable versions of applications. Designed to be inconspicuous, APTs often go unnoticed for long periods before they’re even identified.
Palo Alto Networks prevents APTs by providing up-to-date protections through various stages of the attack. The SWIFT-related and ATM attacks mentioned earlier are examples of multi-stage attacks, where phishing and the introduction of malware likely occurred in the earlier phases.
As part of PAN-OS 8.0, Palo Alto Networks has improved its ability to detect and prevent even the most evasive unknown malware and zero-day exploits. This is accomplished by WildFire automated threat analysis, which:
WildFire does these things and then creates and publishes protections against newly identified malware to all Palo Alto Networks next-generation security appliances in as little as five minutes.
Many financial institutions continue to be under pressure to reduce expenses. A network of remote offices (e.g., retail branches, back-office sites) contributes to this expense base. In addition to the reduction and/or consolidation of such offices, there has been a movement to adopt broadband internet as a lower-cost WAN (Wide Area Network) transport. In parallel, the growing dependency of remote offices on the internet and SaaS applications demands more efficient solutions than internet access via corporate data centers only. Factoring in the growing SD-WAN (software-defined WAN) market that seamlessly aggregates traditional WAN with internet and even 4G/LTE services, an even greater need to secure remote offices has emerged.
Network segmentation of remote sites from the data center is a good idea and can be done centrally. However, if these offices have their own internet connections – especially with local breakout, then a next-generation security appliance at the remote site is warranted. In addition to securing the internet connection, capabilities such as URL filtering, intrusion prevention, and policies to control branch-to-branch traffic are possible.
As part of the PAN-OS 8.0 announcement, we also introduced two new products that are suitable for remote office deployments. These offer the same next-generation security that is available for data centers, where your critical information resides, to the smallest branch offices serving your end users. They are:
Learn more about PAN OS 8.0 and the latest product announcements from Palo Alto Networks.
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