Web Application Firewall – An introduction
What is a Web Application Firewall (WAF)? A Web Application Firewall (WAF) helps protect web applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between a web application and the Internet traffic and by blocking bad HTTP traffic, malicious web service requests, and automated botnets attack. By inspecting the traffic, it can prevent attacks exploiting a web application’s known vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection, cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), cross-site scripting (XSS), DDoS attacks, cookie poisoning, file inclusion, improper system configuration, and more. While proxies generally protect clients, WAFs protect servers from most common attacks faced by web applications . A WAF is deployed to protect a specific web application or set of web applications. A WAF can be considered a reverse proxy protecting the servers from exposure by having clients pass through the WAF before reaching the server. WAFs are especially useful to companies that pro...