Web Application Firewall Technology To Protect Business

By Author: Sailesh Kumar
Total Articles: 6
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Nowadays, the landscape of information exchange and delivery has changed drastically. Web-based applications and services have streamlined the process of information exchange and have enhanced operational efficiency and productivity. Businesses rely on web-based applications for better integration and exchange of information. What remains unchanged is the vulnerability of information on the web.

Competitors and hackers can attack a victim's organizational assets that can cause severe repercussions on the business. It is beyond the reach of traditional network-based security products to prevent cyber attacks. Internet firewall has simplified the process to protect valuable information assets. Traditional security technologies that were initially used are network firewalls, outbound content filtering, anti-malware gateways and intrusion prevention systems.

In order to deal with web-based traffic, the advance next-generation firewalls are deployed. The unified threat management protect organizations against online blended threats like, spam, intrusions, virus, trojans and other online frauds. To prevent web application ...
... attack, wide arrays of functions are employed to work in-sync with perimeter firewall and IPS technology. Primarily, firewalls mainly block attacks hidden by HTTPS encryption, ensure appropriate application operation and page logic flow and provide URL normalization and scanning.

Role of Web Application Firewall Technology:

Prevents custom web attacks: The firewall must recognize the protected applications and identify security changes without the need of any manual input to prevent custom web attacks.

Provide up-to-date protection: Hackers come up with new tools and develop new techniques to attack businesses. The firewall must have state-of-the-art protection to address web-based threats and should identify virus attacks and unauthorized intrusions.

Block web-attacks and not valid traffic: The firewall should contain an analytic engine to identify multiple attack indicators. The unique security system should identify if there is any violation and perform necessary analysis to distinguish between malicious requests and valid traffic

Prevent automated attacks: Cyber crime is no more limited to hacking. It has turned out to be an industry in itself. Vulnerable sites can be easily identified by cyber criminals. The firewall should protect automated attacks such as, comment spam, vulnerability scans and site scraping.

Identify malicious sources and sites: Hackers use unidentified proxies or Tor networks to hide their identity. A firewall must identify malicious sources and sites and detect access from unidentified proxies.

Apply security measures for application vulnerabilities: Most of the web applications have vulnerabilities. It takes more than a month to fix such loopholes. The firewall should have a defense mechanism such as HTTP protocol validation in place to check such issues.

Remove fraud malware: A firewall must be powerful enough to tackle the fraud malware. The security application must be able to analyze web traffic patterns and end-user behavior to identify malware infection.

For more details read Cyberoam.com.