It’s no secret that attackers and their methods have become more targeted, sophisticated and automated. What follows is an evolution in the needs and demands of security teams to tackle new threats and risks. To address the ever-changing threat landscape and provide organizations with the best security capabilities possible, security vendors must continue to evolve as well.
With that, we are proud to announce PAN-OS 8.0, the largest product and feature release in the history of Palo Alto Networks.
The launch includes more than 70 new security features that enhance all aspects of our Next-Generation Security Platform. We are building upon the existing capabilities of our natively engineered cybersecurity platform to provide organizations with the ability to safely enable applications, content and users regardless of location, prevent successful cyberattacks, simplify security operations, and safely embrace the cloud.
The new capabilities in PAN-OS 8.0 will help customers:
Enable Cloud Adoption
Enhancements support migration to diverse, multi-cloud environments, providing consistent, scalable and advanced security, as well as industry-leading integration with key providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, for operational agility and automated scale out. Greater visibility, policy enforcement and actionable dashboards improve security capabilities for SaaS applications, and an expanded lineup of VM-Series virtual firewalls meet a variety of performance needs and use cases. The new VM-50, VM-500 and VM-700 provide industry-leading performance of up to 16 Gbps for small remote offices to data centers and service provider deployments.
Detect and Prevent Evasive Malware and Credential Theft
PAN-OS 8.0 includes several first-ever innovations focused on advanced threat prevention techniques and the prevention of credential theft and abuse. These include a new 100 percent custom-built anti-evasion analysis environment for WildFire; a heuristic engine to dynamically steer highly evasive threats to a bare metal analysis environment for full hardware execution; a fully automated, payload-based command-and-control signature generation and delivery mechanism; and the new MineMeld application that’s integrated with AutoFocus for automated action driven by correlated threat intelligence.
Prevent the use and abuse of stolen credentials by providing a policy-based multi-factor authentication framework natively in the next-generation firewall. This new and unique capability makes it very easy to enforce multi-factor authentication from the firewall to stop cyber adversaries from moving laterally in a network and accessing sensitive resources with the help of stolen credentials or compromised endpoints. This is achieved by working at the network level in conjunction with authentication and identity management frameworks, such as single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, and integrating with a number of next-generation identity access management vendors, including Ping Identity, Duo Security, and Okta to enforce policies.
Scale With Predictable Performance Across a Variety of Use Cases
Designed to handle increasing throughput needs due to increased SSL-encrypted traffic and data center consolidation, as well as increased traffic at the internet gateway, six new models of appliances: PA-5260, PA5250, PA-5220, PA-850, PA-820 and PA-220 enable advanced security protections for large data centers to smaller environments and branch offices.
Management features that provide administrators fast and accurate insight delivered by Panorama, and include ingestion of Traps (advanced endpoint protection) logs, as well as additional firewall logs to enrich correlation of indicators of compromise and automate actions to update the next-generation firewall with new automated actions to prevent adversary lateral movement and alert IT via IT service management and security response systems, such as ServiceNow, lowering operational burden for security teams.
Below are links to additional resources to learn more about PAN-OS 8.0
- On Demand Replay: Security's Colossal Event
- View details on the new products and features included in the PAN-OS 8.0 release
- Watch Lee Klarich, our EVP of Product Management, dive into what’s new in PAN-OS 8.0.