For example, stateless WAFs might check how quickly requests were coming in, whether they were originating from the same source, and other behavioral metrics that might indicate malicious activity was underway. Using pattern recognition, they effectively generated educated guesses on how a web application might react to a specific form of attack using predetermined models of application behavior and attack behavior.

A WAF may come in the form of a cloud-based solution, an appliance, a server plugin, or a filter.Įarly WAFs, which are known as stateless WAFs, used static rules to analyze potential threats arriving via inbound requests to a company’s web application servers. In doing so, it attempts to screen out potentially harmful traffic that may enable web exploits. Via reverse proxy, it monitors, filters, or blocks data packets as they travel to and from a web application. stateful WAFsĪ WAF sits between a company’s web applications and the requests coming in from the internet. Combined, all of these advantages can help a company strengthen its web application security and better safeguard customer data from evolving threats.

From there, teams can receive timely notification of an attack in progress so they can respond much more rapidly to potential security incidents.īecause a WAF provides security administrators with the application visibility necessary to demonstrate compliance with regulatory standards like PCI, HIPAA, and GDPR, it can be valuable from a compliance perspective as well. By helping to proactively set guidelines and rules, application security teams are able to monitor for what should and shouldn’t be allowed through a WAF. The added protection that a WAF provides can help safeguard a company’s reputation and position in the market.Ī WAF also lightens the administrative burden of ensuring proper web application security testing on a continual basis. When successful, these types of incursions can severely compromise customer confidence and even result in regulatory penalties. Businesses typically deploy a WAF to shield their web applications from sophisticated and targeted attacks, like cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection, that might result in fraud or data theft. A WAF can provide critical protection for any online business that must securely handle private customer data.

What is web application firewall