Wednesday, May 22, 2019

By George Finney, Fuel User Group Board Member

When I started in cybersecurity, secrecy was the norm. It was unusual for people to share information about their programs or even about the attacks they had experienced. The phrase, loose lips sink ships, was a common saying. 

Today, the culture of security has changed. We’ve realized that sharing information is much more powerful to protect our communities than secrecy. As John F. Kennedy said in 1963, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” And the tide of cybersecurity rises every time we share information or listen to a story that another person shares.

Monday, May 20, 2019

By Charles Buege, Fuel User Group Member 

In this next article of our IPSec Tunnel series, we will cover what it takes to connect a Palo Alto Networks firewall to a Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA). For me, this became a necessity from nearly day one of having my PA-220 in my home lab, as it was right next to my Cisco ASA. Having services behind each network that I wanted to talk to each other meant that getting the tunnel built between them was a quick necessity.

Thursday, May 2, 2019

Early firewalls were created as a response to growing computer security concerns and were inspired by actual, physical firewalls that were built to keep fires from spreading. The concept of the firewall has changed significantly in its 30+ years of existence. Here we take a look at its evolution up to present day.

Monday, April 22, 2019

By George Finney, Fuel User Group Board Member

As a chief information security officer (CISO) for a university, I sometimes introduce myself in meetings as "Big Brother" to break the ice a little bit. I don't actually read people's email, but I've found getting that kind of issue out on the table early is helpful to building trust. We want our users to know we have well-defined rules of engagement when handling personal information, but we also need them to understand that to provide great security, there can be instances where we need to be a little invasive. Case in point: encrypted traffic.

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Pradeep Biradar is a software engineer for Palo Alto Networks, working on the public cloud team. He recently wrote a detailed blog post on the Palo Alto Networks Live Community blog, sharing how to secure a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) environment on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). 

We spoke with Pradeep to learn more about his career, his thoughts on what cybersecurity professionals should keep an eye on, and dove into some of the specifics of GKE.

Thursday, March 28, 2019

By Dwight Hobbs, Fuel User Group, Board of Directors

Palo Alto Networks recently announced the availability of PAN-OS 9.0, the next major release of their appliance operating system. With any major update there are always bug fixes and improvements, as well as those big new features that everyone wants to get their hands on and try out. For PAN-OS 9.0, the major additions are a new security subscription (called DNS Security), large improvements to URL filtering, a new Policy Optimizer tool, and new high-end firewalls (both physical and virtual).

Unfortunately for me, my organization is going through a tech refresh cycle, so I won’t be able to test out the new features in production for a little while. In the meantime, I want to highlight the two features that I’m most interested in testing.

Thursday, March 21, 2019

From Charles Buege, Fuel User Group Member

Continuing my series on how to setup IPSec tunnels on Palo Alto Networks firewalls, this article covers how to connect to an IPFire firewall. As I wrote in the initial article in this series, I realized not everyone would necessarily have access to the same resources I would. This got me thinking – how could someone with access to only one Palo Alto Networks firewall learn how to setup and configure IPSec tunnels? 

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

In any industry, change and evolution is inevitable, and organizations must put in the work to keep pace. In a recent Fuel Webinar, Tim Woods, vice president of technology alliances at FireMon, used an example of Borders selling its online book operations to Amazon several years ago. The retailer didn't foresee the changing times, believing online retail would not take off. Borders was unable to combine their traditional, physical storefronts with online retail, and now Amazon ranks as the largest book seller in the world.

“We have to be looking for ways to reinvent ourselves. We have to remain innovative. We have to remain competitive,” Woods said. “That’s what businesses are doing today with technology like cloud computing and virtualization, and the Internet of Things.” That’s not to say that Woods doesn’t see the value in traditional infrastructure. On the contrary, it’s combining the old and the new that makes an organization so effective. 

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Charles Buege has been part of the IT industry for over 25 years. He has a passion for his work, and where some might see an insurmountable problem, he sees another challenge to chip away at. Charles has an at-home lab setup, which has allowed him to author several popular “how to” articles for the Fuel blog. 

Charles also runs an IT-based Meetup group in Naperville, Ill., called The IT Crowd. They meet monthly to discuss different technologies centering primarily around DevOps – Palo Alto firewalls, security, virtualization, Linux, and programming languages. 

We spoke with him to learn more about his career path, why he joined Fuel, advice for young professionals, and more.  

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

In a recent episode of Unit 42’s podcast, Don’t Panic (S3E3, "Threat Actor Names"), Rick Howard, Palo Alto Networks CSO, and Ryan Olson, Palo Alto Networks senior director of threat intelligence, hash out threat actor naming.