: Create the Data Center Best Practice WildFire Analysis Profile
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Create the Data Center Best Practice WildFire Analysis Profile

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Create the Data Center Best Practice WildFire Analysis Profile

Protect your data center from unknown threats by sending them to WildFire for analysis.
The other security profiles detect and block known threats. WildFire protects the data center from unknown threats. Configure the firewall to forward all unknown files to WildFire for analysis using the predefined default profile. Unknown threats can hide in many different file types and successful attacks may not be detected until long after they have done damage. For example, WildFire can identify malware loaded onto a staging server before the attacker can do damage and find vulnerability scanners and lateral movement assistance tools before attackers achieve their goals. WildFire could have prevented a number of large-scale enterprise breaches over the past several years. Any security policy rule that controls traffic that has, will have, or could have file transfer activity should include an enabled WildFire Analysis profile.
Set up WildFire appliance content updates to download and install automatically every minute so that you always have the most recent support. For example, support for Linux files and SMB files were first delivered in WildFire appliance content updates.
The reason to attach the default WildFire Analysis profile to all security policy rules that allow traffic is because WildFire provides the best defense against unknown threats and advanced persistent threats (APTs). For example:
  • Traffic from users to the data center—WildFire identifies unknown malware hosted in the data center such as Confluence or SharePoint.
  • Intra data center traffic—WildFire identifies unknown malware spreading among the data center servers, which can prevent the exfiltration of data by discovering the malware before it can do damage.
  • Traffic from the data center to the internet—Because this traffic downloads executables for software and operating system updates, it’s critical to run WildFire on all applications to identify malicious behaviors.
Set up alerts for malware through email, SNMP, or a syslog server so that the firewall immediately notifies you when it encounters a potential issue. The faster you isolate a compromised host, the lower the chance that the previously unknown malware has spread to other data center devices, and the easier it is to remediate the issue.
If necessary, you can restrict the applications and file types sent for analysis based on the traffic’s direction.
WildFire Action settings in the Antivirus profile may impact traffic if the traffic generates a WildFire signature that results in a reset or a drop action. You can exclude internal traffic such as software distribution applications through which you deploy custom-built programs to transition safely to best practices, because WildFire may identify custom-built programs as malicious and generate a signature for them. Check MonitorLogsWildFire Submissions to see if any internal custom-built programs trigger WildFire signatures.