Palo Alto Firewall For Absolute Beginners

Palo Alto Firewall For Absolute Beginners

Hi all, if you are here, I assume you're looking to learn about Palo Alto Firewalls, and you've come to the right place. In this blog post, we will cover the very basics of Palo Alto firewalls and how to get started.

Prerequisites

This blog post assumes you have a basic understanding of networking concepts such as routing, Layer 3 interfaces, traffic flow, subnets, and the necessity of a firewall. If you’ve previously used firewalls from different vendors, that’s even better, and you should find it easier to understand the concepts. When I first started with Palo Alto firewalls, I was already working as a network engineer and had experience with Cisco ASA firewalls. However, it still took some time for me to fully understand the nuances. Therefore, my focus here is to explain the nuances of Palo Alto firewalls using simple examples.

What We Will Cover?

In this post, we’ll touch on several key topics related to Palo Alto firewalls, providing an overview without diving too deep into any single area. I’ve written numerous posts on Palo Alto firewalls, and I will include links to those for more in-depth exploration. Here’s what we’ll cover.

  1. Firewall Basics and Why We Continue reading

HN745: Using Abstractions in Automation

Today’s episode of Heavy Networking comes to you from AutoCon1 in Amsterdam, recorded live on premises. In today’s network automation discussion, we cover abstraction layers with guest Jaakko Rautanen. Practically speaking, what are abstractions, and how do they help make your network automation project successful? We’ll also discuss some of our guest’s automation projects, how... Read more »

A wild week in phishing, and what it means for you

Being a bad guy on the Internet is a really good business. In more than 90% of cybersecurity incidents, phishing is the root cause of the attack, and during this third week of August phishing attacks were reported against the U.S. elections, in the geopolitical conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and to cause $60M in corporate losses.

You might think that after 30 years of email being the top vector for attack and risk we are helpless to do anything about it, but that would be giving too much credit to bad actors, and a misunderstanding of how defenders focused on detections can take control and win. 

Phishing isn’t about email exclusively, or any specific protocol for that matter. Simply put, it is an attempt to get a person, like you or me, to take an action that unwittingly leads to damages. These attacks work because they appear to be authentic, visually or organizationally, such as pretending to be the CEO or CFO of your company, and when you break it down they are three main attack vectors that Cloudflare has seen most impactful from the bad emails we protect our customers Continue reading

A wild week in phishing, and what it means for you

This post is also available in 한국어, 日本語, 简体中文, 繁體中文, Français, Deutsch and Español.

Being a bad guy on the Internet is a really good business. In more than 90% of cybersecurity incidents, phishing is the root cause of the attack, and during this third week of August phishing attacks were reported against the U.S. elections, in the geopolitical conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and to cause $60M in corporate losses.

You might think that after 30 years of email being the top vector for attack and risk we are helpless to do anything about it, but that would be giving too much credit to bad actors, and a misunderstanding of how defenders focused on detections can take control and win.

Phishing isn’t about email exclusively, or any specific protocol for that matter. Simply put, it is an attempt to get a person, like you or me, to take an action that unwittingly leads to damages. These attacks work because they appear to be authentic, visually or organizationally, such as pretending to be the CEO or CFO of your company, and when you break it down they are three Continue reading

Weekend Reads 081624


Beware of Internet FORCES aiming to change your mind or direct your decisions! That acronym, coined by behavioral scientist Patrick Fagan, helps people know when they’re being “nudged.”


Enter your name into an internet search engine and the first few results will probably include detailed profiles of you compiled by “people-search” websites with names like Intelius, PeopleFinders, and Spokeo.


Following the July 19 outages caused by a bad update, the cybersecurity firm faces shareholder lawsuits and pressure to pay damages for at least one major customer, Delta Airlines. Will software liability follow?


Since 1998 — the last year Congress passed a major law to reform the tech industry and protect children in the virtual space — a lot has changed.


According to a damning report from 404 Media, backed with internal Slack chats, emails, and documents obtained by the outlet, Nvidia helped itself to “a human lifetime visual experience worth of training data per day,” Ming-Yu Liu, vice president of Research at Nvidia and a Cosmos project leader, admitted in a May email.


It has been an enduring fascination to see how we could use packet networking in the context of digital communications in space.


At a recent conference Continue reading

Technology Short Take 181

Welcome to Technology Short Take #181! The summer of 2024 is nearly over, and Labor Day rapidly approaches. Take heart, though; here is some reading material for your weekend. From networking to security and from hardware to the cloud, there’s something in here for just about everyone. Enjoy!

Networking

Servers/Hardware

  • Permanent damage? No recall? Ouch! Sean Hollister discusses Intel’s responses to questions asked about instabilities in their 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core desktop processors.
  • Chaim Gartenberg shares a look back at 10 years of Google’s AI-specialized chips (the Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs).

Security

Simplify cloud routing and object storage configurations with Cloud Connector

As part of Cloudflare's mission to help build a better Internet, we’re continuously integrating with other networks and service providers, ensuring ease of use for anyone, anywhere, anytime. 

Today, we’re excited to announce Cloud Connector – a brand-new way to put Cloudflare in front of popular public cloud services, protecting your assets, accelerating applications, and routing your traffic between multiple cloud providers seamlessly.

Cloud Connector is a natural extension of Cloudflare's Connectivity Cloud, which aims to simplify and secure the complex web of connections across today’s enterprises. Imagine Origin Rules, but managed by Cloudflare, available for all plans, created with just a few clicks, and working out of the box without the need for additional rules. It allows you to route traffic to different public clouds without complicated workarounds. This means you can now direct specific requests to AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, or our own R2, even if these services are not set as the DNS target for your hostname.

Whether you’re an e-commerce site looking to route image traffic to the best-performing cloud storage for faster load times, a media company distributing video content efficiently across various cloud providers, or Continue reading

Introducing high-definition portrait video support for Cloudflare Stream

Cloudflare Stream is an end-to-end solution for video encoding, storage, delivery, and playback. Our focus has always been on simplifying all aspects of video for developers. This goal continues to motivate us as we introduce first-class portrait (vertical) video support today. Newly uploaded or ingested portrait videos will now automatically be processed in full HD quality.

Why portrait video

In the past few years, the popularity of portrait video has exploded, motivated by short-form video content applications such as TikTok or YouTube Shorts.  However, Cloudflare customers have been confused as to why their portrait videos appear to be lower quality when viewed on portrait-first devices such as smartphones. This is because our video encoding pipeline previously did not support high-quality portrait videos, leading them to be grainy and lower quality. This pain point has now been addressed with the introduction of high-definition portrait video.

The current stream pipeline

When you upload a video to Stream, it is first encoded into several different “renditions” (sizes or resolutions) before delivery. This is done in order to enable playback in a wide variety of network conditions, as well as to standardize the way a video is experienced. By using these adaptive Continue reading

Introducing high-definition portrait video support for Cloudflare Stream

Cloudflare Stream is an end-to-end solution for video encoding, storage, delivery, and playback. Our focus has always been on simplifying all aspects of video for developers. This goal continues to motivate us as we introduce first-class portrait (vertical) video support today. Newly uploaded or ingested portrait videos will now automatically be processed in full HD quality.

Why portrait video

In the past few years, the popularity of portrait video has exploded, motivated by short-form video content applications such as TikTok or YouTube Shorts.  However, Cloudflare customers have been confused as to why their portrait videos appear to be lower quality when viewed on portrait-first devices such as smartphones. This is because our video encoding pipeline previously did not support high-quality portrait videos, leading them to be grainy and lower quality. This pain point has now been addressed with the introduction of high-definition portrait video.

The current stream pipeline

When you upload a video to Stream, it is first encoded into several different “renditions” (sizes or resolutions) before delivery. This is done in order to enable playback in a wide variety of network conditions, as well as to standardize the way a video is experienced. By using these adaptive bitrate Continue reading

Simplify cloud routing and object storage configurations with Cloud Connector

Introduction

As part of Cloudflare's mission to help build a better Internet, we’re continuously integrating with other networks and service providers, ensuring ease of use for anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Today, we’re excited to announce Cloud Connector – a brand-new way to put Cloudflare in front of popular public cloud services, protecting your assets, accelerating applications, and routing your traffic between multiple cloud providers seamlessly.

Cloud Connector is a natural extension of Cloudflare's Connectivity Cloud, which aims to simplify and secure the complex web of connections across today’s enterprises. Imagine Origin Rules, but managed by Cloudflare, available for all plans, created with just a few clicks, and working out of the box without the need for additional rules. It allows you to route traffic to different public clouds without complicated workarounds. This means you can now direct specific requests to AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, or our own R2, even if these services are not set as the DNS target for your hostname.

Whether you’re an e-commerce site looking to route image traffic to the best-performing cloud storage for faster load times, a media company distributing video content efficiently across various cloud providers, or Continue reading

Using SOPS with Pulumi

I was first introduced to SOPS at a platform engineering event hosted in Denver last year. SOPS, which is an acronym for Secrets OPerationS, describes itself as “an editor of encrypted files that supports YAML, JSON, ENV, INI and BINARY formats and encrypts with AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, age, and PGP” (taken directly from the project’s GitHub repository). In this post, I’ll explore using Pulumi with SOPS—and I’ll also touch upon whether this combination of tools offers value or users or not.

SOPS is a command-line tool written primarily in Go; users can download binaries from the SOPS GitHub repository or, for Linux users, install it via their distribution’s package manager. Depending upon the encryption mechanism you’re going to use, you may also need to install other tools (for example, if you’re going to use AWS KMS then you’ll need the appropriate AWS tools installed and configured). I chose to use Rage, a Rust-based implementation of Age, as my encryption mechanism.

One of the things I find really interesting about SOPS is the fact that it supports data formats like YAML and JSON. What does this mean, exactly? When you Continue reading

Paris 2024 Olympics recap: Internet trends, cyber threats, and popular moments

The Paris 2024 Summer Olympics wrapped up on August 11, 2024, with the Olympic flag being lowered in the Stade de France after 16 days of competitions. With 329 events across 32 sports, over 10,000 athletes from 204 nations participated in the pursuit of medals and glory, creating some viral online moments along the way. In this post, we turn our attention to the closing ceremony, the impact of various Olympic moments on Internet traffic, and the cyber attacks faced by sponsors. We also examine email trends related to the Olympics, including mentions of Simone Biles, Snoop Dogg, and Imane Khelif.

Cloudflare has a global presence with data centers in over 330 cities, supporting millions of customers with different tools and products, which provides a global view of what’s happening on the Internet. This is helpful for improving security, privacy, efficiency, and speed, but also for observing Internet disruptions and traffic trends.

In our previous blog post about the opening ceremony and the early days of the event, we showed how France was impacted by the Olympics, with clear drops in traffic during the main events. The opening ceremony caused the most significant drop—traffic decreased by as much as 20% Continue reading

Paris 2024 Olympics recap: Internet trends, cyber threats, and popular moments

The Paris 2024 Summer Olympics wrapped up on August 11, 2024, with the Olympic flag being lowered in the Stade de France after 16 days of competitions. With 329 events across 32 sports, over 10,000 athletes from 204 nations participated in the pursuit of medals and glory, creating some viral online moments along the way. In this post, we turn our attention to the closing ceremony, the impact of various Olympic moments on Internet traffic, and the cyber attacks faced by sponsors. We also examine email trends related to the Olympics, including mentions of Simone Biles, Snoop Dogg, and Imane Khelif.

Cloudflare has a global presence with data centers in over 330 cities, supporting millions of customers with different tools and products, which provides a global view of what’s happening on the Internet. This is helpful for improving security, privacy, efficiency, and speed, but also for observing Internet disruptions and traffic trends.

In our previous blog post about the opening ceremony and the early days of the event, we showed how France was impacted by the Olympics, with clear drops in traffic during the main events. The opening ceremony caused the most significant drop—traffic decreased by as much as 20% Continue reading

Arista cEOS Got Working MPLS Data Plane

Urs Baumann brought me a nice surprise last weekend. He opened a GitHub issue saying, “MPLS works on Arista cEOS containers in release 4.31.2F” and asking whether we could enable netlab to configure MPLS on cEOS containers.

netlab already had MPLS configuration templates for Arista EOS but reported an error message if you tried to use MPLS with the cEOS containers because the containers did not have a working MPLS data plane.

After a few configuration tweaks and a batch of integration tests later, I had the results: everything worked. You can use MPLS on Arista cEOS with netlab release 1.9.0 (right now @ 1.9.0-dev2), and I’ll be able to create MPLS labs running in GitHub Codespaces in the not-too-distant future.

Huawei’s HiSilicon Can Compete With Nvidia GPUs In China

Each time that the United States has figured out that it needed to do export controls on massively parallel compute engines to try to discourage China from buying such gear and building supercomputers with them, it has already been too late to have much of a long term effect on China’s ability to run the advanced HPC simulations and AI training workloads that we were worried would be enabled by such computing oomph. …

Huawei’s HiSilicon Can Compete With Nvidia GPUs In China was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

1 … 37 38 39 40 41 … 3,760