Palo Alto Networks Inc. is enhancing its Cortex XSOAR cybersecurity platform with a marketplace where users can access automation scripts and other components that can ease their work.

Publicly traded Palo Alto Networks is one of the biggest players in the security market. Its Cortex XSOAR platform automates common tasks involved in network protection teams’ work and provides collaboration features to help team members coordinate with each other. Under the hood, the platform is based on technology that Palo Alto Networks obtained through its $560 million purchase of Demisto Inc. this year.

The Cortex XSOAR Marketplace provides network protection professionals with access to so-called content packs designed to ease their work. These content packs are developed by Palo Alto Networks partners and include technical resources such as scripts for automating common security tasks. The marketplace will also offer integrations with external security tools, dashboards for tracking security issues, report templates for sharing information about those issues and other tools.

Palo Alto Networks says that it will validate content packs to make sure they meet quality standards. The company’s vision with the marketplace is to create a way for customers to easily find tools that can simplify their network protection operations, while giving partners a new means to monetize their security know-how. Palo Alto Networks launched a $80,000 hackathon today aimed at encouraging partners to submit automation scripts.

The third-party content packs that become available in the marketplace could help increase the usefulness of Cortex XSOAR’s native automation features. Rishi Bhargava, the company’s vice president of product strategy, detailed that aspect of the company’s value proposition in a recent interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE studio (below).

The platform uses analytics to help security teams analyze data from threat intelligence feeds.”The biggest piece is applying automation and intelligence to automatically score that and being able to customize the scoring to customers needs,” Bhargava detailed. “As an example, if you get a very high-fidelity [alert] that this particular domain is a malicious domain, you would want to block that in your firewall.”

Photo: Palo Alto Networks