3 Reasons Your Web Application Firewall Is Failing

It has been predicted that 75% of the cyberattacks happen at the application layer. Unfortunately, most of the companies focus excessively on network and psychical layer of the communication treating application layer as a step child.

Think about it, about 97% of all data breaches in the last two years have happened by SQL Injection, an application layer weakness that was discovered more than 20 years ago. Therefore, it is clear that application weaknesses are not dealt with properly. Even if businesses look into app security, they come up with firewalls that fail to perform as expected.  If you are also wondering what makes a WAF obsolete, we have just the answers.

1.  It does not update new threats.

A web application firewall that is blind and deaf to real world threats is bound fail. It is like a box that has been configured to stop on a limited set of threats and nothing beyond that. On the other hand, in real world, dozens of threats are found every day and they need to be stopped to keep the business safe.

2.  It does not stop DDoS attacks.

Denial of service attacks are problematic. On Layer 7 or application layer, distributed denial of service attacks simply do not let the website perform. So when a real user actually comes to the website, it crashes. That is why it is important that a WAF protects against DDoS attacks too. However, most options around today do not offers any protection against these kinds of attacks.

3.  It does not offer expert validation.

No web application firewall can survive without experts handling them. New age businesses need protection against threats from real hackers, something that automated intelligence can never get close to. If you have installed an auto WAF with no human intervention, it will most likely fail at security.