Yesterday, Palo Alto Networks announced that they will soon be releasing Traps 5.0, the new version of their extremely popular cyber security platform.

Recently, they have been focussing on enhancing the capabilities in prevention and creating brand new methods to defend against all types of exploits and criminal behaviour such as malware and the infamous ransomware.

In conjunction with this work, a lot of effort has also been injected into converting Traps into a cloud-delivered advanced endpoint protection service.

Palo Alto Networks are known for listening to their users and implementing changes based on the feedback they receive. Traps 5.0 provides a brand new user interface that is intuitively designed and reduces the challenges that many users run into when using all types of endpoint security management. It streamlines the processes of protecting new endpoints when they are added to the network, and key workflows that are based on policy and event management.

This advanced new interface delivers high capability in sensitivity ranked alerts to enable fast and prioritised event triage. It also provides dynamic grouping which means as endpoints are added, the policies associated with that group is immediately applied.

In addition to this, you can now view WildFire reports directly and instantly from security alerts within Traps. These reports show critical event details including targeted users, applications that the threats originated from, the URLs responsible for the delivery of threats, and behaviour that WildFire dynamic analysis observed.

The Traps management service is a cloud-based, multi-region service that gives companies the option of not investing in the construction of their own global security infrastructure. It also provides value in the fact that you can easily integrate it into Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform. Its extremely easy and painless to install the service and there are no databases, server licenses or other infrastructure that are necessary to begin. This gives organisations the opportunity to protect millions of endpoints without running into any increased costs.

Traps 5.0 brings great improvements to Palo Alto Networks’ offering due to the integration with their Logging Service. Now businesses have increased efficiencies in many areas such as threat hunting and incident response, event management, combining endpoint, network and cloud context.

The management service, mentioned above, sends all logs to the Logging Service which is already visible from the management service itself anyway. The Logging Service acts as the bank which collects and stores all data regarding events and incidents that is caught by Traps.

In earlier versions of Traps, there was an emphasis placed on perfecting the ability to stop malware as it attempted to execute. Traps 5.0 is capable of periodically scanning endpoints for dormant malware. If an unwanted or malicious file is pinpointed, Traps will swiftly quarantine the file which ensures minimal damage is done and the malware cannot spread any further.

The latest major OS platforms that has been made compatible with Traps is Linux. That means customers are now able to protect resource and performance sensitive cloud workloads against shady behaviour with host-based security. As a lot of Linux-based workloads are moving to the cloud, the lightweight Traps agent provides you with exploit protection while impacting performance and system resources minimally.

If you are thinking about implementing Palo Alto Traps 5.0, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We would love to have a conversation about how Traps would fit into your environment and answer any questions you may have.