Palo Alto Networks WildFire Reviews

WildFire is being deployed based on vendor and security best practices and recommendations from our Managed Service Provider. leveraging their inherent knowledge it allows us to think outside the box. 

When  a security Intel threat talks about an IOC. We can then go to our MSP and ask, "Is there a signature for this particular type of malware?" The response is generally  yes, it is applied almost in real time. 

It's not a problem specific to the technology, it's a problem across the board. All the encrypted traffic can be a challenge. Becoming a man in the middle requires CPU cycles, causing additional  overhead.

The stability's great as long as its sized correctly. no huge hits from a CPU or RAM from a performance perspective. It would be prudent to monitor performance statistics. 

The way it's delivered, I don't see scalability being an issue.

We're a managed service, so we've got to fill in the middle that's running interference for us.

The initial setup is really straightforward. Turn the WildFire service on within firewalls and then apply that service to the security policies you want.

Some services require additional licensing. WildFire was one of the services we definitely wanted out of the gate. Suggestion is to determine your requirements of services and map back to the cost of turning on the service.

Install the solution set it up the service in alert mode. Run reports and determine how you want it tuned, them move into block mode. You may want to go to  block mode right away with known out of the box threats. 

We don't want a virus. We don't want people visiting unknown sites and opening us up to any type of malware or any type of virus attacks.

We haven't had a virus. That is a good thing. It makes my job easier. For the organization as a whole, no viruses mean people keep their jobs, which is a good thing.

It is an outstanding solution. It is one of the top solutions out there from what we have tested, and we have even tested Cisco Firepower.

You can see everything that's going on in your network. It constantly updates their signatures and new anti-spyware signatures. That is updated daily.

It catches modified signatures of known viruses. It is an easy interface to use. 

They should make their user interface a little more user-friendly.

We are a decent size organization. If the product can fit our organization, it should be able to fit pretty much any other organization just as well.

Their technical support is outstanding and top-notch.

They were things that only somebody who had worked with Palo Alto before would probably be able to break down, then tell you how to set up your initial rule sets and explain what exactly they do. The vendor helped us look at what we have going out versus what is coming in.

They provided in-house support when we initially set it up. They made sure that we were supported from start to finish. Any questions we had, we had someone that we could reach out to, and we had an answer within a matter of minutes to hours. They are very responsive and easy to work with.

Test it in your environment because everyone's environment is different.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Price matching up with features.
• Support
• SLA agreements
• Customer relationship management.

I use WildFire mostly for customers, especially when they ask about firewalls. We recommend Palo Alto, FortiGate, Check Point, and then a customer decides what is the best firewall for their tasks. 

I generally recommend WildFire for telecom companies, banks, supermarkets, or any company which has its own IT infrastructure.

It provides threat intelligence that supports customers' proactive defense strategies. If a customer has an updated database of signatures or behavior, it is useful for their protection.

The features depend on the file format. For Windows, there is one set of features, and for Linux binaries, it is another. All sandboxes basically work with new binaries for Linux or macOS since they are not able to emulate behavior, and they are unable to analyze what code snippets or what behavior is malicious for binaries.

Improving detection on non-Windows formats would be beneficial as there are many samples, such as Linux or ransomware for macOS. Enhancing detection in these areas would be great.

I have been familiar with WildFire for two to three years, but it depends on the customer because it can be rather periodic.

I have files tickets and their support was great. I was able to solve the problems of my customers.

Positive

I have interacted with Microsoft Box and some online sandboxes.

Generally speaking, it is hard to analyze ROI since no one in Ukraine did analytics on sandbox networks.

It is hard to say because there is a significant difference between some European countries and Ukraine in the ability to buy expensive products. European countries may not find it a huge problem to spend $10,000, however, it is a significant issue for Ukrainian companies, especially given the current situation with war.

I use any online sandbox which is allowed to be public and frequently check malicious files in virus or sandboxes, including virus total information.

I would recommend improving detection in non-Windows formats. Currently, scripts like PHP scripts, Bash scripts, and other issues not related to Windows rank much worse.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Palo Alto Networks WildFire is being used as an effective zero-day threat prevention solution. When a file comes in from a user innocently clicking on a website, then downloading the file, for example, if your Palo Alto is set up in a way that detects what is happening in that traffic going through, whether the file is an audio file, a DLL, an executable file, etc., if it thinks that file is unsafe, it will ask for a second opinion from Palo Alto Networks WildFire.

If you'll imagine how a network would work: You've got your computer, then your antivirus on the computer, then you have your internet gateway. That suspicious file will stop at the gateway, rather than stopping at the computer. Think about hurdles, where you've got these people running over hurdles, and to win the race, you have to jump over every single hurdle. If you get one of those hurdles wrong, that's it. You're done. That's why we're doing this check almost at the perimeter, or at the edge of the network, instead of on the device, because once you're on the device, it means you're on the network.

What I found most valuable in Palo Alto Networks WildFire is that it's intuitive. I also love the App-ID feature, especially because it works out of the box. I can also instantly see all the traffic going out, e.g. I can just plug a firewall in, then connect one network socket to a switch, etc. There's no configuration I need to do to see it. It just tells me that you're sending BitTorrent traffic, or SLL traffic, or you're going into 365, etc. It just does that out of the box, and it's the best thing that this solution can do. Straight away you can see all the traffic going through your network.

Palo Alto Networks WildFire, because it's from Palo Alto Networks, has better visibility on everything, so they can see what's happening in the world. They recently released the Palo Alto Networks WildFire machine learning feature on the firewall, so it's them saying: "This thing's happening on your firewall, so you should do this," and it just does it for you. Rather than relying on a human to interpret these problems, it will just do it for you, and that's pretty cool. I've not played with the machine learning feature myself, but that's something I'm very keen to have a look at.

We do a lot with charities, and I'd love Palo Alto Networks WildFire to have more discounts, e.g. charity discounts, so we can protect healthcare and schools, then other than aiming at the universities and the big hospitals where it's a lot of money, we can go for the smaller schools, too. They make quite a killing there. 

Again, it's just charity pricing, but because we are a partner with them, we can do that ourselves, e.g. we can buy it and then reduce our margins on it to get them over. We feel that it's better to sell the device that's very good at a lower cost, then, we lock in with their services at the end, so work management, etc. Rather than saying, "It's going to cost you this much money, and it's too expensive to even begin with."

I've been a reseller of Palo Alto Networks WildFire for four years now.

Palo Alto Networks WildFire is a stable solution.

Palo Alto Networks WildFire is scalable, particularly if you pick the right firewall, and that's it: you can do what you need to with it.

With five being the highest and one being the lowest, I'm scoring the technical support for Palo Alto Networks WildFire a four. They're very, very good, but there is still room for improvement when some issues become more complex. If you understand the system, then you'll also understand why it is like it is.

Setting up Palo Alto Networks WildFire is easy out of the box, because you just plug in the cables you need, but the way it works is you need to have an understanding of networking, otherwise, setting it up will be difficult. If you are the right type of person, then you'll have no problems with the setup.

Palo Alto Networks WildFire is quite expensive, and this is what puts people off.

The way Palo Alto Networks WildFire works is that it's essentially a service that you get from Palo Alto as part of your subscription. You can subscribe to it at an additional cost, and the idea is it can communicate with all the Palo Alto devices in the world about a file, e.g. whether a file is suspicious or harmless.

For example, a machine in Australia downloads a file, and it doesn't know if it's a file that can be trusted or not. The Palo Alto Networks WildFire process is that it takes that file, and then moves it to the WildFire service in the cloud, so there's a transaction from the firewall doing that.

Let's say it's a Word file or something that looks suspicious, Palo Alto Networks WildFire then detonates the file, e.g. it takes that file and runs checks against it, before and after, and then it sees the difference and says, "Well, this actual file contains a payload." The way that it works then, is that there are attackers or people who are trying to subvert systems, and they will say, "Oh, if this file is running on a virtual machine, like in a sandbox environment, don't do the thing that you're going to do, only when it's a physical thing, like actual hardware.

The Palo Alto Networks WildFire process is a process that goes through all these other checks, e.g. it runs on physical, on virtual, on different types of Linux, MacOS, etc. This file is checked against all these different environments to see if it's okay or not, so this is done off the box, off the firewall.

This is the service that you pay for as part of that subscription, so when it's done, essentially that file is marked as safe, that's cool. If it's marked as bad, then that file, the hash is taken from it, so it's easily identified, then through the Palo Alto Networks WildFire subscription, all the firewalls in the world then get that information within just one minute, if you set it to that. It will say something similar to: "Look out for this file if you ever see it", and then all the machines now knows that the file is dodgy or suspicious. That's what Palo Alto Networks WildFire does.

Palo Alto Networks is very well rounded. They're building an ecosystem: the Palo Alto ecosystem. You've got global protect VPNs and they are the armor that works on the whole ecosystem. They also have integrations, e.g. there are other applications from HP that plug into the device, because it's got the APIs there.

For the deployment and maintenance of Palo Alto Networks WildFire, one person can do it, but it's a special tool, so a network staff that just looks after a server would probably struggle with it, just because of some of the concepts that you need to use. There are specific trainings you'd need to do to get the best out of it, but one specialist could do it, e.g. it's not unheard of.

My advice to others looking into implementing this solution is for them not to be put off by the cost. It's similar to looking at cars, e.g. there's a reason people like Jaguar cars over the Fords. I've always got this mantra that if you have a network, if you have a data network, and if it's going to cost you, e.g. if you look at the fines associated with various industries, and if you're a school that gets a data breach, it'll cost you this much money. The question is: "Can you afford that much money as a company?" If your answer is "No", then you have to look at mitigating it. I would suggest looking at Palo Alto Networks WildFire and saying, "Well, we do these types of things to protect your network."

If you still don't want to pay that money, then chances are, you don't particularly care about security. If you want to pay for that kind of thing to stave off the bigger fine that results from getting a data breach, or getting hacked, etc., then that's how we think about it. Don't be off put by the cost when you're looking at it. Palo Alto Networks WildFire is a very comprehensive device. They are the best firewalls in the world.

There are also other solutions like UTMs and XGs, e.g. if you like Fortigate, but everyone I've shown the Palo Alto to instantly said: "This big screen here: I can see all the traffic going through", and you just filter it at the top, and it just makes more sense to people. It's very intuitive.

My rating for Palo Alto Networks WildFire is eight out of ten. It's not a perfect score because of its cost.

I work on the network equipment in our company including switches, routers, firewalls, VPN, and all of the perimeter devices. Palo Alto WildFire is one of the products that we use to secure our network.

Generally, it detects threats to our network and blocks them. This includes checking applications for malware.

What I like about Palo Alto is that it is a complete product, with everything in it.

In the future, I would like to see more automation in the reporting.

We have been using WildFire for between four and five years.

This product is pretty stable.

Our network and security group are the ones who use it. We haven't had to scale beyond that.

We don't have a lot of contact with technical support but when we do, they are pretty quick.

I haven't used another solution that is better than this one.

The initial setup is straightforward. It was not complex for me at all.

The pricing is highly expensive.

From my perspective, Palo Alto is the best solution in the market. This is the reason that we implemented it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is for threat intelligence, to detect threats.

This solution has given us a higher level of assurance that we don't have an active threat.

The most valuable feature is the Automatic Verdict feature that recognizes whether something is a threat or not.

I would like to see them continue their developmental roadmap for the product.

We have never experienced any downtime or inaccuracies.

This product is super scalable.

Their technical support is excellent.

We previously used a different solution but it was ineffective and didn't integrate well.

The initial setup for this solution was very easy. You just turn it on and put it in monitoring mode. One person can deploy and maintain this product.

We implemented in-house.

The ROI is pretty much right away.

The licensing fees are on an annual basis and there are no costs in addition to the standard fees.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated OpenDNS.

WildFire is a perfect complement to a Palo Alto Firewall, it's invaluable.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are a solution provider and WildFire is one of the security products that we implement for our customers. We are also using it for testing purposes.

It is primarily used to check for cloud-based malware.

Nowadays, this product is very important for customers because there are a large number of zero-day attacks. It gives them a sense of security and confidence because you never know what type of malware will be invented tomorrow.

The most valuable feature is the cloud-based protection against zero-day malware attacks.

The only complaint that we receive from our customers is in regards to the price. Our clients are happy with the technical aspects, but the cost is expensive.

Some customers complain that it takes a long time to make changes to the configuration, but this depends on the customer and the environment. It may not be a problem that is directly related to the product. There are a lot of changes that need to be made for the security of a big company.

The technical support team in Poland should be larger.

Palo Alto needs to invest more in marketing because there is not enough awareness for the brand in Poland. 

We have been using WildFire for one year.

We have not experienced any problems related to stability in our environment, and have not had any such complaints from our clients. 

We have not had any issues that required going outside of our own technical team.

The Palo Alto team in Poland is very small, so getting an engineer's time can be a challenge.  If you have a small team then it's hard to support everybody. The local distributor has taken over some of the responsibilities for solving technical issues that customers have.

My thinking is that we don't have to contact technical support with serious issues because we don't have big problems with the product. I'm sure that there are bigger customers in need of support, and it may be lacking in Poland, but of course, there is an international team that can handle issues as well.

We deal with other vendors including Cisco and Fortinet, and we see a trend where more and more companies are implementing a WildFire-type solution into their products.

Fortinet is the market leader in Poland, in part because of their pricing. Another important thing is that if you want to implement a PoC and need a device of any kind, it is readily available from Fortinet. However, with Palo Alto, it cannot be done so quickly.

We have been in contact with Cisco technical support, and it is much easier to contact an engineer than it is with Palo Alto. The Cisco support is really good in Poland.

When it comes to installation and configuration, it is very good. The length of time required for deployment depend on the number of features and how much configuration has to be done. Typically, it takes between one and three weeks.

We also deploy WildFire using VM models so that we can test various solutions for our clients.

Our in-house team is responsible for the deployment, maintenance, and support.

This is an expensive product and the market for Palo Alto in Poland could be much bigger if the pricing was comparable to Fortinet. We have lost a lot of deals to Fortinet over the price issue.

As an example, if somebody is satisfied with Fortinet and they only need to renew their subscription then it is difficult to convince them to try a completely new device at a higher price.

WildFire is always a product that we recommend for our Palo Alto clients because it tracks potential malware in the cloud and it is very important to prevent these types of attacks.

In today's climate with the pandemic, a lot of staff are working offsite and remotely, leading to a surge in internet usage. This makes the work environments prone to various threats, which is one of the reasons that products like WildFire are so important.

Overall, from our point of view, it is a good product that works well.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

This product/feature is an enhancement to traditional company/corporate AV and VP solutions, not a replacement. As such, it strengthens existing protections and provides significant visibility into files and applications that are moving through the company's systems.

Detailed reporting on analysis of content. The inspections are easily applied to security policy profiles and profile groups, and may be assigned on a per-rule basis.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

I have never accessed PAN (Palo Alto Networks) technical support regarding this feature.

This is a fairly unique feature offered by Palo Alto Networks (may be comparable to FireEye). As such, it was an addition to our existing protection suites.

Very straightforward. Basically, a few check boxes and desired behaviors.

It is expensive, a feature more accessible to enterprise class customers, but provides an enhanced possibility that Zero- or near-Zero-day threats may be identified and mitigated. The cost of the product weighed against the potential impact of even one successful crypto malware-type exploit may justify the expense.

No, again this "WildFire" is a fairly unique feature. The closest comparison may be FireEye, but I have not used that product.

Consider your level of exposure to exploits of any nature. Also, consider the impact (cost and loss of business) of even one successful exploit to help make a business decision regarding this product.

I would also advise that the decision should be considered with regard to the company's ability/willingness to provide the assets to keep abreast of these types of products and features. There are no set and forget type functions.