By constantly scanning for vulnerabilities, WAFs often notice weak points long before you do. This additional layer of protection will scan all traffic to your site, securing it against known malicious bots and multiple different attack vectors.īut WAFs don’t just passively monitor activity: they also proactively shore up weaknesses in your web applications. Installing a firewall that can analyze traffic for suspicious activity may help set your mind at ease. If you’re in charge of any sensitive data-credit card information, social security numbers, or health or financial records-you’ve likely spent a few late nights thinking about all the scary things that can happen to that information. What Is The Purpose Of A Web Application Firewall?

Here’s why you should consider including a WAF in your security arsenal. With so many possible ways to protect your site from attack, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed-and natural to wonder whether all these defenses are necessary. Detects things such as attempting to access an LDAP directory, inject shell commands, and attacks against PHP.Įnforces policies around the HTTP protocol, such as methods that are supported and headers that are allowed.ĭetects unusual use of the HTTP protocol that may indicate an attack, but that also may be legitimate.ĭetects violations of the HTTP protocol that often indicate an attacker attempting to penetrate a site.ĭetects excessively large numbers of HTTP headers, HTTP arguments or files.ĭetects attacks against SQL servers that attempt to inject SQL statements through the web to leak information or take control of a SQL server.ĭetects cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks that may result in unwanted HTML being inserted into web pages.ĭetects attacks against SQL servers that attempt to inject SQL statements through the web to leak information or take control of a SQL server via URIs.ĭetects cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks that may result in unwanted HTML being inserted into web pages via URIs.Now that you know all about web application firewalls (WAFs), you may be wondering: What is the benefit of a web application firewall? Detects bad web robots that are not from search engines but perform malicious searching and spidering of websites.ĭetects generic attacks against web-based applications without specific knowledge of the application.

What is web application firewall