Palo Alto Networks NGFW does not respond to ping from HPE Procurve/Aruba switches

Another unexpected Zone Protection Profile doing it’s thing – in this case sending a ping from an end-user device (such as Windows/macOS computer) to an IP interface (gateway) on a Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall was coming back with a response, but requests from HPE ProCurve (Aruba) switches (2920/2530) appeared to disappear into oblivion with no response. A little… Read more



FreeIPA to Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall User-ID

Logs from the FreeIPA server can be used with the Syslog receiver function of a PAN NGFW to send username to IP address mappings into User-ID and in turn be used to create policies based on the users identity. To extract the data from the logs you will need the parser shown below. View the code on Gist. I could… Read more



Aruba Instant – PAN Syslog Parse Profile

A little treat that I hope will help someone at some point, for those with Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewalls (NGFW) and Aruba Instant Wi-Fi you can forward syslog messages from the controller to the NGFW and parse them with the profile below to map users to IP addresses. There is plenty of information on syslog to User-ID at… Read more



Palo Alto NGFW, decryption and images in Slack not displaying or uploading

You may find that when doing decryption on a Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall that images in Slack channels are not displayed or are only shown in a very low resolution – in addition images cannot be uploaded. When inspecting the HTTP error messages in your browser a 503 response may also be seen. To top off the issue… Read more



Detecting threats with inbound SSL (TLS) decryption

Today we have the answer to the question – Without SSL decryption how many threats/attempted vulnerability exploits/other bad stuff will I miss that are coming from the internet at my internally hosted (externally published) web sites and services? To run some simple tests (which will be detected as malicious attacks) I’m going to be running the Nessus scanner against a… Read more



Backing up a Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall with PowerShell

For some time there have been plenty of examples of backing up Palo Alto Firewalls with curl commands (extracting the files using the XML API) however that may not sit well with some Windows administrators who want to use PowerShell. As such I’ve put together the BackupPANNGFWConfig repo on GitHub which contains the scripts to get ahold of the API… Read more