Web application firewalls (WAF) offer protection from a range of cyber threats, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting and DDoS attacks. Each WAF solution offers its own strengths and weaknesses – buyers should compare several vendors before finding one that best meets their needs.
Fastly is honored to have earned recognition in 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer Report for Cloud Web Application Firewalls. Fastly offers an unrivaled combination of security capabilities including dynamic application proofing and bot mitigation.
AWS WAF
WAFs (Web Application Firewalls) act as an intermediary between users and web applications, monitoring HTTP communication to analyze it for malicious requests and block them before reaching end users or web applications. This helps safeguard businesses against zero-day attacks as well as application layer threats such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), bot traffic that could compromise web application performance.
With AWS WAF, you can use its visual rule builder to quickly and easily create rules to filter and block traffic. CloudWatch and Amazon Kinesis allow for monitoring incoming web requests; and WAF can be deployed both on-premises or public cloud environments – providing Managed Rules which protect against OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities and other common threats.
Rules can block traffic based on conditions such as IP addresses or URLs that originate, and insert HTTP headers for web requests processing by your application. Furthermore, WAF can be configured into count mode so you can evaluate their impact before deploying them into production mode.
Akamai App and API Protector
APIs have become the go-to attack surface, so it’s critical that they be safeguarded using an approach with no compromises. Akamai’s solution combines web application firewall, bot mitigation, API security and Layer 7 DDoS protection into one product for maximum ease-of-use to help security teams focus their attention on addressing only critical risks.
This platform inspects traffic at the edge to detect and prevent threats without impacting performance or user experience. It offers advanced defenses against DDoS, WAF and other attacks using its extensive threat database and real-time security intelligence; additionally it includes auto API discovery, adaptive detections, built-in bot mitigation capabilities and continuous self-tuning for optimal results.
Akamai’s solutions use an Adaptive Security Engine to detect 2x more attacks while producing 5x fewer false positives than competing technologies. This is accomplished by correlating intelligence from across Akamai’s vast network with data/metadata from every request, which leads to intelligent decision-making tailored specifically to each organization. When combined with automatic updates, DevOps integration, and machine learning-powered self-tuning for efficient security for any business.
Barracuda Web Application Firewall
Barracuda WAF can protect applications and data breaches on-premise, in the cloud or public data centers – eliminating application vulnerabilities and preventing breaches with signature-based and anomaly detection that is designed to combat today’s sophisticated attacks including those listed in OWASP Top 10.
ScanOut scans outbound traffic for any sensitive data leakage, including credit card and U.S. social security numbers that are automatically blocked or masked without administrator intervention. Furthermore, its centralized notification view provides you with comprehensive yet granular alerts.
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is available as software, making installation on an existing server seamless and eliminating the need to purchase separate hardware just for its firewall function. It features a comprehensive REST API to allow for configuration and monitoring programmatically while its role-based access control provides fine-grained permissions for various user groups while its threat detection can detect botnets or TOR networks and take actions against threats in order to mitigate risks.
Imperva
Imperva is a leading cybersecurity system provider, catering to businesses of various kinds. Offering both an on-premise WAF solution and cloud WAF service, Imperva helps businesses meet regulatory compliance requirements by combatting cyber attacks while protecting web servers from damage. Their product also features Incapsula which gathers threat intelligence from its customer base before sharing it across their community.
This product can be easily deployed on-premises or in AWS and Azure environments, supporting various application layers while operating in blocking mode with low false positive rates. Other features include backdoor protection, account takeover prevention, two-factor authentication and SIEM integration. In addition, they offer a free demo version that features an intuitive console that enables users to configure rules specifically tailored to their business. Furthermore, third-party systems and microservices integration allows customers to protect their entire infrastructure with one single solution.