Integrate your Palo Alto Networks firewall alerts directly into WDATP machine timeline and alert queue
Firewall and IPS/IDS are common tools in every organization’s security toolbox. While those tools can proficiently detect suspicious connections to command and control servers (C2 server) from a client machine, actionable alerts that pinpoint the process which created the connection are not surfaced for security teams to investigate and respond to.
In this blog we’ll demonstrate how to integrate Palo Alto Networks Next-Gen Firewall alerts with Windows Defender ATP to leverage the power of their detections to identify actionable alerts. Palo Alto Networks Next-Gen Firewall has an API which allows Palo Alto’s customers to get alerts from the alerts log of both the firewall and WildFire sandbox. You can choose to use the API to get information from a specific firewall appliance or use the same API with Palo Alto Networks Panorama which allows you to get the alerts from all of your Palo Alto Networks Next-Gen Firewall and WildFire appliances.
You can get the full documentation of the Palo Alto Networks API here.
Let’s start
It is only 3 simple steps that will get you the desired integration:
- Step 1: Settings in Palo Alto Networks Next-Gen Firewall.
- Read-only API role creation
- User creation and role assignment
- Update the sample script
- Step 2: Windows Defender ATP settings:
- Add API permissions.
- Step 3: Test runs
- WildFire alert
- Firewall alert
Step 1 - Settings in Palo Alto Networks Next-Gen Firewall:
To get the alerts from Palo Alto Networks Next-Gen Firewall we first need to create a user on the firewall with the required permissions:
- Open the Palo Alto Networks Next-Gen Firewall administration console.
- Login as a privileged user.
- Go to Device > Admin Role > Add.
- Give a name to the role and remove all the permissions on all tabs except from “Log” permission under XML-API tab then click OK.
- Go to Device > Administrators > Add.
- Enter a name and a password, choose “Role Based” in the administrator type settings and in the profile’s field chose the role we created.
- Important!!! Click Commit on the right upper corner.
Done! you have successfully added a user with the required permissions.
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Note: since many organizations leave the firewall with the default self-signed certificate, I’ve added a bypass in the script (published by PoshKazun on Github). If your firewall is set with a trusted certificate you can change the “trustSelfSignCertificate” parameter to false. |
Download the Powershell script attached to this blog and save it in the same folder you save the Get-Token.ps1 script from the Hello world blog and modify the “#### required information from step 1 #####” section
A typical section may look like:
$firewallURL = "https://TheUrlToYourFireallMgmtConsole"
$username = "theNewUserWeCreated"
$password = "NewUserPassword"
$alertQueryTimeframe = 30
$minimumAlertSeverity = "medium"
Done! you successfully complete the required steps to use Palo Alto Networks API
Step 2: Settings in Windows Defender ATP
In this step, we will add the required permissions to Windows Defender ATP.
we will add the permission to the application we set in the Hello World blog. If you didn’t setup an application yet, you need to follow the hello world 3 short steps to create one.
First, we need to add the permission “Run advance queries” and “Read and write all alerts”
- Open the Azure portal.
- Navigate to Azure Active Directory > App registrations.
- Under All Apps, find and select the application, for example, ContosoSIEMConnector.
- Navigate to Settings > Required permissions > Enable Access.
- Select the checkbox for “Run advance queries” and “Read and write alert” application permission.
- Click Save and Grant Permissions.
Done! you successfully added the required permission to windows Defender ATP.
Step 3: Test runs
WildFire Alert
Download Palo Alto Networks Wildfire test file and create an alert in WDATP Portal.
- Open your browser and navigate to https://wildfire.paloaltonetworks.com/publicapi/test/pe
- Wait 5-10 minutes and run the powershell script.
Firewall Alert
Create a fake suspicious network connection and create an alert in WDATP Portal.
- Open your browser and navigate to
https://testing.com/book.html?default=<script>alert(XSS test)</script>
- Wait 5 minutes and run the powershell script.
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Note: if your firewall policy action for vulnerabilities set to “Reset-both”, then the firewall will reset the connection before it starts. In that case, you will not find a network connection telemetry in WDATP portal. |
Now open WDATP portal and look for the alerts. You should find Palo Alto Network firewall alert and Palo Alto Networks Wildfire alerts in WDATP alert queue.
And in machine timeline:
Recommendations:
We recommend scheduling the integration script to run every 20 minutes with alertQueryTimeframe set to 30 minutes to allow overlap.
Conclusion:
While network protection solutions catch the threats in the network bottleneck, they still miss the context and the ability to remediate the endpoint. The combination of Palo Alto Networks firewall and WDATP creates a unique better-together value from detection to remediation. In future blogs we'll show you how to force AutoIR to automatically remediate the root of the threat.
You can follow these steps to create Windows Defender ATP's alerts from other security/SOAR/SIEM solutions.
Let us know if you are interested to integrate alerts from other sources.
Thanks!
@Haim Goldshtein, security software engineer, Windows Defender ATP
@Dan Michelson, program manager, Windows Defender ATP
@Ben Alfasi, software engineer, Windows Defender ATP
