Web Application Firewall

What is Web Application Firewall?

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a web application firewall that helps protect you from common web exploits and large-scale attacks that can affect your web availability, compromise web security, or consume excessive resources that cause your website to go down.

WAF gives you control over secure traffic, blocks traffic that indicates a threat to web security systems, and protects against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

To better understand WAF, it is necessary to understand the concept of a firewall before understanding WAF.

A firewall is a concept where an appliance or application is tasked with filtering, monitoring, and blocking data passing through a network. Examples of firewalls in networking are Cisco ASA and Sonicwall, while WAF is more commonly used in application filtering. Examples of firewall usage include mitigating junk data packets such as DDOS, Brute Force Attacks, and botnet attacks, but WAF has special filters to mitigate SQL Injection, XSS Attacks, and so on.

For open-source solutions, there are WAFs such as Mod Security and Commodo WAF, designed to mitigate 10 common types of attacks on the internet. Typically, alongside implementing a network firewall, an application firewall known as a WAF is also implemented. The latest WAFs utilize cloud-based systems. 

Why Should Use a Web Application Firewall?

Seeing that online businesses are growing, website security systems have become one of the things that must be prioritized. Not only large websites are targets of hacker attacks, small websites also have the same chance of becoming targets of cyber attacks. WAF can protect company and customer data when hackers attack company websites with the aim of obtaining sensitive data.

They can use this data to commit fraud, sell it to unauthorized parties, or even blackmail. By using WAF, your website will be protected from suspicious traffic. In addition, WAF can also protect your business reputation because if your company has a data breach, it will have a negative impact on your company’s reputation. People tend to find it difficult to trust a company that cannot protect important data, whether it belongs to customers, employees, or even the company itself.

Benefits of Using a Web Application Firewall for Your Business?

WAF offers a number of benefits over other traditional firewalls, as it has better visibility into sensitive data from the HTTP layer. Our firewall can prevent application layer attacks that typically bypass traditional firewalls. With WAF, it can provide solutions such as preventing cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, which allow attackers to inject and execute malicious scripts in other users’ browsers. WAF can also prevent Structured Query Language (SQL) attacks, which allow any application to use an SQL database, enabling attackers to access and modify important company data. WAF is also capable of preventing Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, which can flood the network with traffic, preventing it from serving users.