Free and Premium Paloalto Networks NetSec-Pro Dumps Questions Answers

Heartbeat pollingis a core HA function to monitor connectivity between HA peers, leveraging ICMP pings to determine link health and availability.

“Heartbeat Polling uses ICMP pings to verify the connectivity and health of the HA peers. If heartbeat polling fails, the firewall considers the peer to be down and may initiate failover.”

(Source: HA Link and Path Monitoring)

If ICMP pings fail, checking heartbeat polling logs helps identify if link or path monitoring triggers the failover.

To fully leverageinline cloud analysisin Advanced Threat Prevention, security profiles (e.g., anti-spyware) must beupdated or newly createdto enable local deep learning and inline cloud analysis models.

“To activate inline cloud analysis, update your Anti-Spyware profile to enable advanced inline detection engines, including deep learning-based models and cloud-delivered signatures.”

(Source: Inline Cloud Analysis and Deep Learning)

This ensuresreal-time protectionfrom sophisticated threats beyond static signatures.

Device grouping rulesin SCM allow administrators toorganize firewalls into logical groupsand collectively manage updates or configuration pushes across those groups.

“SCM allows you to create device group rules, enabling streamlined management and collective updates of multiple NGFW instances.”

(Source: SCM Device Grouping)

This approach ensures consistency in software versions and configuration baselines across large deployments.

TheSP3 architectureof Palo Alto NGFWs ensures that additional security services (CDSS) only cause aminor reduction in performance, as traffic is inspected once in a single pass.

“The single-pass parallel processing (SP3) architecture performs application identification and security enforcement simultaneously in one pass, resulting in only minor performance impacts when enabling multiple security services.”

(Source: SP3 Architecture)

Unlike traditional multi-pass engines, SP3 architecture optimizes performance while delivering comprehensive security.

A security profile group named“default”is automatically applied to all new security rules unless a specific profile group is explicitly configured.

“If a security profile group named ‘default’ exists, it will be automatically applied to any newly created security policy rules to ensure consistent protection.”

(Source: Security Profile Groups)

This behavior ensures that newly created policies are always protected by default security profiles, minimizing human error.

When implementing SSL Forward Proxy decryption for outbound traffic, two key challenges that must be evaluated are:

Incomplete certificate chains: This occurs when the firewall cannot validate the entire certificate chain for a site, which may cause decryption failures.

Certificate pinning: Applications like banking apps may use certificate pinning to prevent MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks, and these applications will break if SSL Forward Proxy is used.

“When decrypting outbound SSL traffic, you must consider incomplete certificate chains, which can cause decryption to fail if the firewall cannot validate the entire chain. Also, be aware of certificate pinning in applications that prevents decryption by rejecting forged certificates.”

(Source: Palo Alto Networks Decryption Concepts)

TheAnti-spyware profileincludes DNS-based protections like sinkholing and detection of DNS queries to malicious domains, offering real-time protection against attacks that exploit DNS misconfigurations.

“The Anti-Spyware profile protects against DNS-based threats by sinkholing DNS queries to malicious domains and detecting suspicious DNS activity, thus blocking data exfiltration and C2 communication.”

(Source: Anti-Spyware Profiles)

Prisma Access for secure remote access

“Prisma Access extends consistent security and optimized connectivity to branch locations, enabling secure access for mobile and branch users.”

(Source: Prisma Access Overview)

Centralized management for consistent policy enforcement

“Centralized management using Strata Cloud Manager or Panorama ensures security policies and updates are uniformly applied across distributed locations, preventing policy drift and security gaps.”

(Source: Strata Cloud Manager Best Practices)

These two practices are foundational for modern, distributed enterprise networks to maintain security posture and performance.

Cloud NGFW for AWS can be configured usingPanoramafor centralized management, as well as theAWS management consolefor native integration and configuration.

“You can configure Cloud NGFW for AWS using Panorama for centralized security management, or directly through the AWS management console to deploy and manage security services for your AWS resources.”

(Source: Cloud NGFW for AWS Guide)

Protecting againstmaliciousandmisconfigured domainsrequires two critical services:

Advanced Threat Prevention

Provides signature-based and advanced analysis to identify threats, including DNS-based attacks.

“Advanced Threat Prevention enables the NGFW to detect and prevent exploits and malware-based communications, including those leveraging DNS.”

(Source: Advanced Threat Prevention)

Advanced DNS Security

Specifically designed to detect and sinkhole malicious and misconfigured DNS queries.

“DNS Security uses real-time intelligence to block DNS-based threats, protect against data exfiltration, and automatically sinkhole suspicious domain lookups.”

(Source: DNS Security)

Bycombiningthese services in security policies, NGFWs ensure robust protection against domain-based threats and misconfigurations.

When usingAWS centralized deploymentsfor Cloud NGFW, the service deploys NGFW instances intoselected VPCsas additional workloads to secure that traffic.

“In centralized deployments, Cloud NGFW instances are deployed as security appliances within the selected VPCs, ensuring consistent traffic inspection and protection.”

(Source: Cloud NGFW Deployment Models)

This approach minimizes complexity and ensures direct security policy enforcement within AWS.

Dynamic path selectionis the foundation of SD-WAN, leveraging real-time performance data to dynamically route traffic over the best available path.

“Dynamic path selection continuously monitors performance metrics (loss, latency, jitter) and makes real-time routing decisions to ensure application SLAs are met across the WAN.”

(Source: Prisma SD-WAN Dynamic Path Selection)

Establishing dynamic path selection first ensures the rest of the SD-WAN optimizations (e.g., failover, QoS) work effectively.

Palo Alto Networks requires upgrading to thenext major feature releasebefore moving to newer releases. This ensures stability and compatibility.

“When upgrading across multiple major PAN-OS releases, you must upgrade to each intermediate major feature release. Skipping major releases is not supported.”

(Source: Upgrade Considerations)

For PAN-OS 9.1 → 11.2, the proper path is:

9.1 → 10.0 → 11.2

Strata Cloud Manager (SCM)offers acloud-based unified managementplane for both NGFWs and Prisma Access, enabling consistent policy enforcement, simplified management, and AI-driven operational insights.

“Strata Cloud Manager provides a single interface for unified management of NGFWs and Prisma Access, leveraging AI to optimize security operations and streamline workflows.”

(Source: Strata Cloud Manager Overview)

Unlike Panorama, which is an on-premises management solution, SCM delivers cloud-based, AI-driven capabilities for centralized oversight.

Negated source addressesexclude traffic from the specified region. To avoid accidental connectivity loss for trafficfrom that region, create a separate Security policy toexplicitly permit it.

“When you use a negated region in a Security policy rule, ensure to create an additional Security policy to permit traffic from the excluded (negated) region to avoid unintentional drops.”

(Source: Prisma Access Policy Best Practices)

This ensuresexplicit inclusivity for the excluded region, maintaining reliable connectivity.

Voice quality issues in SD-WAN deployments are typically linked to path performance metrics (latency, jitter, packet loss). Reviewingreal-time analyticshelps pinpoint root causes and appropriate mitigation.

“When experiencing performance issues, the first step is to analyze real-time performance data. Prisma SD-WAN provides path quality analytics to identify degradation and ensure informed troubleshooting.”

(Source: Prisma SD-WAN Monitoring)

This data-driven approach avoids unnecessary configuration changes.

Single floating IP address(also known as a floating IP or shared IP) is supported only in anactive/passiveHA pair. In active/active HA, both firewalls are forwarding traffic simultaneously and thus do not share a single floating IP.

“In active/passive HA, a single floating IP address is used for seamless failover. Active/active HA requires separate IP addresses and does not support a single floating IP.”

(Source: Active/Passive vs. Active/Active HA)

Thissimplifies failoverin active/passive deployments by using a single shared IP that moves to the active peer upon failover.

Applications and threats

Panorama can push application and threat signature updates to managed firewalls, ensuring consistent application and threat visibility.

“Panorama uses dynamic updates to distribute the latest application and threat signature packs to all managed firewalls.”

(Source: Manage Content Updates in Panorama)

WildFire

Panorama also distributes WildFire signature updates to firewalls for real-time malware detection.

“WildFire updates provide the latest malware signatures to enhance detection and prevention, and can be deployed to all managed firewalls via Panorama.”

(Source: WildFire and Dynamic Updates)