WAF solutions to provide complete coverage whileadapting to changing IT environment
In today’s dynamic and fast moving world, the Web can be a 
dangerous place to conduct business. SQL injections, cross-site scripting, illegal resource access, remote file inclusion etc. are some of the tools available to hackers attacking web applications. This unfortunate reality compels state-of-the art web application security and enterprise network security solutionsto adapt from a nice-to-have into a mission critical mandate.
Businesses require a next-generation WAF that is flexible enough to adapt to changing IT infrastructuresand the evolving threat landscape, and also change based on the needs of the business.
In the background of the above, here are some of the characteristics that a WAF needs to provide to keep businesses on top of their game:
Agility Equals SecurityRisks –DevOps and agile development practices are great at creating new applications quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, the fluidity of these environments also creates a bevy of unintended security risks. Ensurea WAF solutioncan automatically detect and protect applications as they are added to the network by automatically creating new policies and procedures.
Cover That Top Ten List – Industry pundits and experts at security consortiums and communities continue to categorize and identify the greatest web application security risks facing organizations. A WAF solution should provide complete coverage, including all OWASP Top 10 risks.
Device Fingerprinting – Bots, crawlers and spammers, using new techniques to disguise malicious traffic, can exhaust resources and scrape sensitive information from websites or cloud-based assets. A good WAF needs to sniff out these clandestine cyber assaulters. Device fingerprinting identifies, blacklists and blocks machines used for attacks regardless of the IP they hide behind. Even if the bot dynamically changes its source IP address, its device fingerprint does not change.
Negative + Positive = Zero-Day Protection – Advanced application and “smoke screen” attacks that use DDoS assaults to mask other tactics are becoming commonplace, while zero-day assaults swiftly exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities. Negative and positive security models that automatically detect application domains, analyze potential vulnerabilities, and assign optimal protection policies are critical.
Who’s Knocking at the Door? – Enforcing web access control policies and security procedures is a bread and butter function of any WAF. How to do it is where the devil is in the detail. Ensure any WAF offering supports user authentication and single sign-on (SSO) functions. This applies two-factor authentication and enables accessto premise-based applications from outside the enterprise network. In addition, it ensures access to data based on auser’s role/business needs.
Two Minds Are Better Than One – Cyber-attacks are increasing in severity and complexity, making it difficult for organizations to stay ahead of the rapidly evolving threat landscape. To assist, a WAF vendor should provide options for fully managed services for both on-premises and cloud-based WAF deployments. This provides the organization with the insight and expertise from security experts that can assume full responsibility to configure and update security policies as well as actively monitor, detect, alert and mitigate attacks in real time.
Protection Via Unification – Leading analysts agree that the best WAF solution is one that provides both on-premises and cloud-based offerings. It provides a unified solution that ensures complete availability and protection with no security gaps between on-premises and web applications, and facilitates quick and easy migration of applications to the cloud.
AppWall a Better Web Application Firewall Solution
AppWall is a Web application firewall solution that ensures fast, reliable and secure delivery of mission-critical Web applications. It enables PCI compliance through mitigation of Web application security threats and vulnerabilities, preventing data theft and manipulation of sensitive corporate data, and protecting customer information. Additionally, it reduces the increasing risk of your enterprise’s infrastructure being used to attack others.
AppWall is the first WAF to provide a real-time security patching solution for web applications in agile and continuous deployment environments via tight integrations with Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) solutions. It detects and patches vulnerable resources automatically whenever an application resource change is introduced.
AppWall is a core part of Radware’s next-generation Attack Mitigation System (AMS).
By Nikhil Taneja ,Managing Director – INDIA & SAARC, Radware
