Super Shield ****! * * * *

Today, Web applications are prime targets for attackers because of the potential profit opportunities. Security breaches on Web applications can cost millions of dollars.

Strikingly, outages and distributed denial of service (DDoS) related to DNS (Domain name System) have had a negative impact on business. Web application firewalls are the first line of defense in a broad response.

The basic function of a Web application firewall is to establish hardened boundaries to prevent certain types of malicious traffic from obtaining resources. Although WAF has been around since the 1990s, this early technology has not kept up with recent and increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks.

They do not have the ability to provide complete application control and visibility. With increasing security risks, Web application firewalls are no longer the only solution that can provide adequate protection.

Some traditional WAFs are barely alive

Earlier ****, Web applications were less common and Web threats were less common. The malicious autonomous attack program is low in complexity and easy to detect. Low security requirements can be solved through basic network security precautions.

Today, everything has changed. **Web applications can exist in on-premise, cloud, or mixed data environments. ** Customers and employees can access the web from anywhere. Because IP addresses are constantly changing and overwritten by CDN, firewalls cannot track changing data, where requests are going, and so on.

WAF should defend against a variety of challenging and complex threats. Traditional WAFS are defined as hardware devices, and most of their counterparts on the market are difficult to use, lack of visibility, and poor performance. In some way, 90 percent of organizations say their WAF makes the process too cumbersome.

According to the Ponemon study **, 65% of organizations claimed that their WAFs had experienced shunting, and only 9% said they could not be broken. ** Therefore, companies should be concerned about WAF performance and security.

The questionnaire

Challenges for traditional WAFs

We often hear from industry members who are switching from traditional Web application firewalls to new-age WAFs. Most of the reasons that motivate them to switch are as follows:

1. Technological innovation

Web application standards continue to evolve, increasing the demands on what WAFs must provide.

The growing use of JSON payloads and HTTP/2 has forced most Web application firewall vendors to compete with them. At a time when the market expects constant innovation, many WAF vendors are becoming increasingly vulnerable.

2. Lack of scalability

Organizations’ need for network expansion adds to some of the challenges: increasingly expensive, time consuming, and complex. Deploying and maintaining a cluster of devices becomes very complex.

DevOps and Agile methods require consistent reconfiguration and re-tuning of clusters, which can strain the resources of security teams.

3. Zero-day vulnerability

While WAFs effectively monitor Web traffic to prevent HTTP-specific attacks, they cannot defend against zero-day attacks.

WAFs are designed to detect pre-configured patterns – zero-day vulnerabilities can be exploited by any risk vector, but this has been discovered after pre-configured rules.

4. Block legitimate traffic

Another complaint most WAF users have is that it inadvertently blocks valid traffic, also known as false positives. While this may sound relatively harmless in terms of security, it can be disastrous for the organization. Serious cases can even prevent visitors from benefiting from the application’s features, blocking uploads or purchases.

One possible way to deal with this challenge is to implement a minimum number of patterns, but this could make the network more vulnerable. ** Most WAF solutions find it difficult to balance the action.

Unless you devote dedicated resources to managing it, it will be very difficult to capture the value of a traditional WAF. This is the biggest gap, because traditional WAFs can’t deliver on their promises.

5. DDoS attacks

On top of that, DDoS difficulties can cause problems for WAF installations. ** We have seen many organizations use WAFs to prevent DDoS attacks. ** The main reason they claim is that WAFs can be upgraded to mitigate DDoS attacks.

The problem, however, is that traditional WAFs are not set up to resist large-scale DDoS attacks.

Also, today’s applications are shared/provided by third party platforms and cannot be protected by a local defense layer. Without cloud-based WAF, it’s hard to plan for upfront capacity, and even if you do, it still has an upper limit.

Cloud WaFs (especially managed Cloud WaFs) have the ability to scale to solve this problem. The business pays only by value and does not have to pay a fixed fee for what may or may not happen in the future.

Understand the functionality of WAF in the new era

While many WAF providers claim to offer next-generation products, most use the same security patterns as traditional WAFs, so the basic features of A WAF that can keep up with the needs of the new era include:

1. Application and Web usage control

What types of traffic should be blocked? Use multiple identity categories to identify their exact identity in sites and applications across the network and determine how to treat them.

** Can accurately classify traffic, is the core of the next generation WAF. ** This prevents organizations from accessing illegal, malicious or irrelevant websites and applications.

2. Advanced Web application security analysis

Cloud-based WAFs can fend off the new types of attacks that most Web applications are experiencing, as well as analyze and improve visibility threats.

WAF monitors performance metrics in real time, highlighting real-time data for infrastructure, applications, and end users. It allows people to react before things go wrong, so the WAF can be trusted to work as expected.

3. Web application security assessment and malware detection

Companies sometimes want to grant access to social media platforms, but these platforms often contain malicious links or files. Providing and continuing to implement WAF policies related to application risk is the main advantage of the new era of WAF.

4. All-node defense

Monitor and analyze traffic for all global deployments. Once a security threat is detected on a node, all monitored nodes are deployed, updated, and hardened.

5. Automatic intervention

Cloud-based WAFs not only rely on predefined policies and signatures to block traffic, but also provide managed services for precise custom rules based on risk.

Based on real-time pattern and behavior analysis, it continuously monitors and automatically filters out valid requests and malicious actors. It also provides virtual patches to prevent the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities and other vulnerabilities.

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