Industry statistics state that the average cost of a single data breach to US-based businesses last year was $5.9 million. This covers the price of corrective action and losses from lost data, lost services, and reputational damage.
Websites and web apps are now the main targets of sophisticated cyber assaults as more and more businesses move their business applications and critical data to the cloud.
In order for enterprises to prevent costly data breaches and downtime, web application firewalls (WAF) are designed to secure both internal and external web applications and data. WAFs are set up in front of web servers to thwart hacking attempts, track application access, and gather access logs for compliance/auditing and analytics.
To bypass conventional defenses, carefully constructed threats that imitate real website traffic are detected and blocked by WAFs. They are useful at stopping threats (such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and remote file inclusion), attacks like site scraping and comment spam, and application-layer DDoS attacks launched by hostile botnets.
In addition, WAFs enable e-commerce merchants to meet PCI-DSS regulations by identifying and patching “self-inflicted” vulnerabilities in internal web applications developed by businesses.
First installed as physical equipment in the enterprise data center, WAFs are now also offered as virtual appliances, cloud-based services (sometimes connected with a CDN), or as a separate module inside Application Delivery Controllers.
With a wide selection of devices offering various levels of security capabilities, the WAF industry is expanding swiftly. Your firm’s business priorities, needs, and budget will determine the best product to use.
Here is a ranking of the top 10 for-profit Web application firewalls to get you started.
1-Citrix
An appliance-based WAF, the Citrix NetScaler AppFirewall assists businesses in securing their applications and data without degrading user experience or performance. The appliance monitors all incoming and outgoing traffic, which is placed in front of your web server (including SSL-encrypted traffic). To ensure proper application behavior, NetScaler AppFirewall enforces both positive and negative security models. This enables it to provide zero-day protection against unauthorized exploitation. Known vulnerabilities and threats are also found using automatically updated signatures. The PCI-DSS compliance of NetScaler AppFirewall is ensured through a specialized reporting tool.
2-Imperva
A platform for cloud-based application delivery is Imperva. It offers customers services like load balancing, failover, website security, and DDoS protection via a worldwide content delivery network.
Imperva has held the sole leadership position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls for the past two years. Business-critical enterprise applications and data are shielded from web threats, including application layer DDoS attacks, by its SecureSphere WAF appliance, which complies with PCI standards. Imperva has the lowest false-positive rate in the market thanks to dynamic application profiling, which “learns” application behavior.
Imperva stands out from the competition since it also provides its top-tier web application security technology as a cloud-based service. It’s easy-to-deploy service, known as Imperva Incapsula, provides the same enterprise-grade protection as Imperva SecureSphere at a competitive price point, making it suitable for both large businesses and small and medium-sized businesses.
One of ALSCO’s products, Secure Gateway®, sometimes known as S.G., is. The Secure Gateway® user’s hosting provider and the visitor are connected via ALSCO, which serves as a gateway for websites. ALSCO also offers distributed domain name server services.
The enterprise Rule Set is administered by the cloud-based, PCI-certified Secure Gateway® WAF in conjunction with its own Secure Gateway® rules, heuristics, and reputation database. Moreover, it is possible to create unique security rules (depending on your service plan). Application traffic is inspected by Secure Gateway® WAF before it reaches your web server. Utilizing network traffic analysis to detect malicious visitors, applying rules to identify those visitors, and blocking or challenging those visitors based on the pre-defined rule action are covered by various U.S. patents (US10630721B1 and US10498760B1).
The WAF defends against common web dangers like application-layer DDoS attacks, comment spam, excessive bot crawling, and SQL injection.
Websites and applications are shielded from data breaches and defacements by the Barracuda Web Application Firewall (WAF). It can identify between authentic users and botnets using heuristic fingerprinting and I.P. reputation algorithms, which allows it to block application layer DDoS activity.
Barracuda also offers robust authentication and access control features to protect sensitive apps and data from unauthorized access, and virtual patching safeguards applications against zero-day threats. Barracuda can be deployed on-premises, in a private cloud, or in third-party cloud settings like Amazon or Microsoft Azure. It is available as a hardware or virtual appliance.
5-Sucuri
A cloud-based WAF called Sucuri Website Firewall is particularly made for smaller clients, such as bloggers, e-commerce sites, and other business clients who need to defend a single website. Sucuri acts as an intermediary between your website and the rest of the internet, blocking malicious activity and attacks while directing only safe traffic to your website.
Sucuri guards your website against hacking attempts, vulnerabilities, and potential blacklisting by search engines using a proprietary method for application profiling, malicious URL filtering, and anomaly detection.
I switched to Sucuri from Incapsula when hackers discovered ways to get around their WAF and hack my website; this has never happened since.
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