Know What You Are Missing with Your WAF Providers
October 15, 2019
With cybercrimes and cyberattacks emerging as the biggest risks faced by businesses and their end customers, robust, dynamic, and comprehensive cybersecurity strategies and measures have become imperative for businesses of all kinds and sizes. WAF or Web Application Firewall is and must be an essential part of any comprehensive web security solution. It is the first line of defense that shields the website/ web application from bad actors and malicious requests.
Having said this, it is important to note that not all WAF providers effectively and proactively secure your website/ web application from attacks for a variety of reasons. Here is a list of power-packed features that your WAF must have but you may be missing with your WAF providers.
1. An Intelligent, Comprehensive, Managed WAF
Often, web scanning tools and dated firewalls are disguised as web app firewalls by several WAF providers. These tools only scan your websites/ web applications and do not help you to remediate the vulnerabilities found or effectively stop attacks.
The Web App Firewall must be comprehensive to ensure all known vulnerabilities are detected from across the application, server, third-party resources, etc. immediately patched until fixed by developers and all malicious/ illegitimate requests filtered out.
WAF must be intelligent, equipped with AI, ML, and Global Threat Intelligence Database so that it learns from past attack history of the business itself and attacks across the globe. It continuously finds new areas to crawl for vulnerabilities. Intelligent WAFs can differentiate between bots and human traffic and decide whether to allow, block, flag, or challenge a request.
It must be managed (combining the power of automation with the expertise and skills of certified security specialists) to build custom measures and strategies proactively and consistently to keep pace with the external and internal changes and maintain a strong defense against threats.
2. Customization with surgical accuracy
No two businesses are alike and accordingly, their security risks, risk appetite, security needs, etc. are also unique. A generic and one-size-fits-all approach to cybersecurity is detrimental to the business. Security measures including WAF rules must be customized with surgical accuracy for the unique needs of the business and must be continuously tuned to keep with the dynamism of the application itself and the emerging threats.
3. Business logic vulnerability assessments, pen-testing, and security audits
Automated scanners expedite the process of identifying all known vulnerabilities. However, they miss business logic vulnerabilities which may be seemingly legitimate requests but are damaging, nonetheless. Similarly, there are unknown vulnerabilities, misconfiguration, and security weaknesses that automation and WAFs may miss. To identify these and mitigate the risks associated with them, certified security experts must conduct business logic vulnerability assessments, pen-tests, and security audits to strengthen the security strategies and security posture of the website. So, the WAF must be part of an end-to-end security solution.
4. Flexible and hassle-free deployment
The Web App Firewall must be easy, flexible, and hassle-free to deploy, causing zero downtimes for onboarding. Cloud WAF is such a solution.
5. Zero assured false positives
A managed WAF assures zero false positives to ensure that the limited and precious bandwidth of the developers and other resources are not eroded in something that is not or not yet a threat.
WAF also helps protect against attacks that use previously unknown vulnerabilities; by blocking these attacks before they can do any damage, developers are less likely to suffer from a false positive that results in a lot of wasted time and resources being spent fighting something that’s not really an attack.
6. Round-the-clock availability of website/ web application
The Managed WAF must be able to ensure that your website/ web application is available round-the-clock for your end-users with zero downtimes or crashes. In essence, the WAF must provide proactive, instantaneous, multi-layered, and tailored protection to your web applications against DDoS attacks of all kinds.
Heightened web security must not interfere with the speed, agility, or performance of the website and vice-versa. The best security solutions offer CDN services to do so.
7. 24×7 visibility of risk posture and business impact
The WAF must have a comprehensive and informative dashboard that provides security insights and real-time, 24×7 visibility of your risk posture and business impact. This way you will not just know what vulnerabilities are present but also where and why they originated, source of blocked requests, etc. and thereby, enabling you and your security team to take proactive measures to strengthen security.
AppTrana is a solution that provides all the above power-packed features and is trusted by 1100+ global business clients. Choose AppTrana and focus on your core business, leaving your website security concerns to the experts.
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