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What is a WAF - Web Application Firewall

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WAF is an acronym for Web Application Firewall (WAF). A WAF is designed to monitor and protect applications or servers from malicious attacks.

A WAF can be thought of as a layer of software that can be hosted in the cloud or on a private network, that data packets pass through in order to reach their target. Based on rules, the data packets may be allowed to pass through or they could be blocked before reaching the designated target.

Using a WAF can help in a variety of ways including:

  • Reducing unwanted load on hardware resources
  • Improving responsiveness for real users
  • Identifying usage patterns
  • Reducing the risk of data loss
  • Improving credibility with customers

WAFHub has the ability to detect and prevent common web application attacks. These attacks include SQL injection, cross-site scripting, XSS, etc. WAFHub can also detect and alert when a website or app is compromised or under a live attack.

A WAF typically logs attacks it has seen to ensure those same attack signatures are prevented in the future. A WAF builds a database of known attack signatures so they can be used to protect and mitigate against future attacks and to understand and manage new risks. This is the essence of a WAF solution, it has to help keep your website secure against future threats without investing in expensive upgrades.

The primary way a WAF helps keep an online system secure is through automated analysis. When requests are made, the WAF will analyse and help identifiy attacks which can be hard to understand without prior knowledge.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack involves flooding an internet server with data requests in order to stop it from working properly. An SQL injection attack, on the other hand, takes advantage of vulnerabilities in software code to flood the server with requests and cause it to crash.

A WAF is designed specifically to prevent these types of attacks. It checks for input errors and invalid data before proceeding with each request on your site and then blocks them if there’s a high probability that they will lead to a system crash or another type of cyberattack.

Most WAFs require a level of competency to setup correctyly. Blacklisting is a method most WAFs facilitiy that involves allowing all the data packets to pass through and blocking identified signatures that are known to be harmful or unwanted. Detecting and maintaining the blacklist in the most part can be automated but there is always the chance for error and human intervention maybe required. While whitelisting uses allowed IP addresses to define evil traffic, blacklisting uses rules that would be frequently updated. To protect a public website or application, blacklisting is the preferred method to implement for a WAF as there would be a huge amount of unknown traffic received on such platforms and it’s hard to decide whether or not it’s benign to implement whitelisting.

Luciky WAFHub has been designed to use the aggregated knowledge from all the companies using the service to improve detection and learning rates and help better protect your website or application from attacks without the need for continued intervention although being able to manually adjust the rules is possible.

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