Our journey on web application security has already had important chapters, such as questions to be asked during the selection of a WAF and a list showing how Azion’s WAF helps combat each of the OWASP Top 10 threats.
In this post, we will demonstrate the advantages of adopting Azion’s WAF to protect your applications and APIs from known, emerging, and zero-day threats.
How Azion WAF Works
To offer the best protection to our customers, Azion’s WAF uses a scoring-based detection method. This means that each received request is compared with a detailed set of rules and is given a score, which can be associated with web application security risks.
A key advantage of tying this approach with Azion’s multi-layered protection architecture is our edge platform’s wide distribution across independent points of presence, also known as edge locations. Simply put, this means all requests are received and dealt with directly within our infrastructure, eliminating the need for either a fresh connection with the source or the use of an isolated cloud platform. With every incoming request, we apply a highly efficient and effective set of security rules. Based on the score assigned, potentially harmful requests can be blocked right at the edge locations without having to establish a new request or connection with the source. This leads to an immediate mitigation at the origin of the potential attack.
Additionally, you can personally adjust the sensitivity level for blocking each threat category based on the unique aspects of your application and business. This helps in reducing false-positive cases while ensuring the safety of your application and its users from varied threats. The tool’s learning phase also guarantees this. During this phase, the WAF Rule Set identifies your application’s valid behaviors and incorporates them into a whitelist, or a list of pre-approved actions.
WAF Tuning also enables the customization of your WAF’s behavior through an analysis of IP addresses that are frequently blocked. This adjustment makes the scoring rules accommodate internal traffic and authorized testing on your application in a more flexible manner.
Easy and Fast Configuration and Implementation
In addition to ensuring efficient protection once deployed, Azion’s WAF also offers the benefit of easy and quick configuration and implementation. Using intuitive dashboards and interfaces, you can create your WAF instance, define specific rules for your business, establish sensitivity levels, and implement security globally at the edge locations in just a few minutes.
In addition to delivering effective protection post-deployment, Azion’s WAF is also advantageous due to its rapid and straightforward setup and implementation. By leveraging user-friendly dashboards and interfaces, you can create your own WAF instance, dictate rules tailor-made for your business, and set varying sensitivity levels. Furthermore, you can globally launch this security setting at the edge locations within a matter of minutes.
Azion’s WAF is Scoring-Based
The scoring-based method is the most efficient and least resource-draining when it comes to threat detection, which is why Azion’s WAF employs it. This approach allows you to achieve optimal detection and mitigation of both familiar and unfamiliar threats. It simultaneously reduces the occurrences of false positives and enables the execution of specific policies for both bots and human users. All of these benefits are enjoyed without any compromise on performance or the need for frequent updates.
Moreover, since the rules can be set based on features usually found in suspicious requests, a scoring-based WAF has the capability to block even undiscovered threats. This makes it notably more reliable and successful in thwarting emerging and zero-day attacks.
Pre-set and Customizable Rules
To leverage all these benefits, you can either use the pre-set rules (which default to the highest sensitivity level) or tailor the rules and conditions based on your business’s specific needs. This way, you can strengthen your defense against common threats while lowering the sensitivity of others to prevent false positives. The image below provides an example of how all this is seamlessly done in our Real-Time Manager.
Compliance with the Most Recognized Standards and Regulations in the Market
In today’s globalized information-driven economy, it’s crucial to adhere to stringent data compliance rules to safeguard your users’ information. To assure our customers of this protection, Azion’s WAF complies with globally renowned compliance standards like SOC 3 and PCI DSS v4.0.
Furthermore, due to the presence of our edge locations across five continents, Azion makes it easier to comply with local data compliance rules. This prevents the flow of sensitive data through servers that may not align with the regulations of specific countries and regions.
Success Cases with Azion’s WAF
Our scoring-based WAF’s effectiveness is corroborated by customer testimonials and has been proven in real-life situations where security challenges revealed vulnerabilities in WAF solutions offered by global vendors.
For example, at the end of 2022, a successful SQL Injection (SQLi) attack, popularly known as “WAF Bypass”, affected a large number of applications protected by WAFs from some of the biggest global players. Azion’s WAF, on the other hand, was able to block this attack without needing additional rules or any kind of update: the standard protection of our WAF against SQLi proved effective in 100% of the tests carried out.
In the first half of 2023, another attack, now known as CRLF Injection Bypass, also surprised major service providers who use signature-based WAFs and found themselves vulnerable to this emerging threat. Once again, Azion’s WAF proved its effectiveness without the need for any updates.
Our customers also attest to the effectiveness and efficiency of Azion’s WAF on a daily basis. Companies such as B2W (which includes platforms such as Americanas.com and Submarino.com) and Magalu and Netshoes are some of those that have used our solution to block millions of attacks a year and drastically reduce the number of false positives, which are common in signature-based WAFs and can be harmful because they prevent legitimate traffic from reaching applications.
Conclusion
The Azion WAF is the perfect match for companies that want to protect their applications against OWASP Top 10 threats, emerging attacks and zero-day exploits without losing out on performance or blocking legitimate traffic. Set up a free account now to discover all the benefits of our WAF and edge computing in practice, or click here to learn more.
