Tag Archives: NGFW

June "In the Trend of VM" (#28): Linux kernel, Microsoft Defender, and Palo Alto Networks device vulnerabilities

About Remote Code Execution - PAN-OS (CVE-2026-0300) vulnerability

About Remote Code Execution - PAN-OS (CVE-2026-0300) vulnerability. PAN-OS is an operating system for Palo Alto Networks firewalls and security platforms. User-ID™ Authentication Portal (also known as Captive Portal) is a non-default PAN-OS feature used to map IP addresses to usernames. By exploiting a buffer overflow vulnerability (CWE-787), an unauthenticated remote attacker can send specially crafted packets to a device with the Authentication Portal enabled, achieving arbitrary code execution with root privileges on the affected device. No authentication or user interaction is required. If the vulnerability is successfully exploited, the attacker gains full control over network traffic: they can intercept, modify, or block connections, access sensitive data, bypass security policies, hide traces of compromise, install backdoors, and use the device as a foothold for attacks on internal infrastructure.

⚙️ The vendor security advisory was published on May 6. PA-Series and VM-Series firewalls are affected. Prisma Access, Cloud NGFW, and Panorama appliances are not impacted by this vulnerability. Security updates for affected devices became available on May 13. As a workaround, the vendor recommended restricting User-ID™ Authentication Portal access to only trusted internal zones or disabling the User-ID™ Authentication Portal entirely if it is not required.

👾 On the same day, May 6, researchers from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 published a report on active exploitation of the vulnerability in the wild. Post-exploitation activity includes deployment of publicly available tunneling tools (EarthWorm, ReverseSocks5), Active Directory enumeration using credentials likely obtained from the firewall, and systematic destruction of logs and other evidence of compromise. On the same day, the vulnerability was added to the CISA KEV catalog.

🛠 A public exploit was also published on GitHub on May 6.

🌐 PAN-OS is among the most widely deployed enterprise firewall operating systems in the world. As of June 5, Shodan identifies approximately 135,755 internet-facing PAN-OS instances, representing a significant attack surface.

About Denial of Service - PAN-OS (CVE-2024-3393) vulnerability

What I expect from IT Asset Inventory

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What I expect from IT Asset Inventory. The main problem of vulnerability management, in my opinion, is that it is not always clear whether we know about ALL network hosts existing in our infrastructure or not. So, not the actual process of scanning and the detection of vulnerabilities, but the lack of knowledge what we should scan.

Knowing the total number of active hosts, this must be such a simple and basic thing. But for a large organization, this is not so trivial. To tell the truth, I do not know how to do IT Asset Inventory right. I’m not even sure who should be responsible this. There are so many different technological and organizational nuances. I will mention some of them below.

Who is responsible for inventorying IT assets?

But I can say with confidence that my basic requirement for IT Asset Inventory system will be the completeness of the scope, not the number of collected parameters. The very minimum is just to see that some network host existed and seemed active at some time.

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Retrieving Palo Alto NGFW security events via API

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Retrieving Palo Alto NGFW security events via API. It may seem like NGFW topic is not really related to vulnerability assessment and vulnerability management. In fact, correlation of security events in traffic with vulnerability scan data sometimes may give very interesting results. For example, if we have a Windows desktop host with critical vulnerabilities, it won’t be a big surprise to detect some botnet activity related to this host. Fixing of this hosts should be a high priority task. Moreover, Palo Alto NGFW now supports signatures for vulnerability detection, like Tenable PVS. It’s pretty logical: if you are already searching something in the network traffic, why not to look also for vulnerable software versions in the packet headers?

I took this image from the official manual

At the “Monitoring” tab of Palo Alto NGFW GUI web-interface you can see a flow of security events, produced by Palo Alto security rules, standard or custom. With PA query language you may easily filter this events. It is also possible to produce reports. However, the standard reports Palo Alto are not very informative and only represent some statistics of attacks without any additional information. Much more interesting reports you can make using Palo Alto API.