

However, they are also far less effective against bad bots attacking the OWASP automated threats list because they are not exploiting flaws in programming but business logic, which most WAFs do not sufficiently understand or protect against. For the cases of bad bots, third-party evaluations place WAFs at 80% to 90% efficacy in detecting and/or stopping bots that attempt to exploit programming flaws such as the OWASP Top 10. Good bots get along with WAF technology because they generally follow the rules of bot etiquette because their owners do not want to be blocked or banned from sites, while bad bots do not obey such rules. WAFs are typically deployed as a reverse proxy to protect a specific web application or a set of web applications.They can come in the form of an appliance, server plug-in or filter, and be customized to a specific application. While proxies generally protect clients, WAFs protect servers. Web application firewalls (WAF) are a type of application firewall that specifically focuses on HTTP applications.Īs defined by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), a non-profit focused on improving software security, WAFs are designed to protect websites from attacks that network firewalls and intrusion detection systems can’t, and they don’t require modifications to application source code.Ī WAF applies a set of rules to an HTTP conversation, OWASP notes, and these rules generally cover common attacks such as cross-site scripting and SQL injection.
