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Web Application Firewalls


A WAF or web application firewall helps protect web applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP or HTTPS traffic between a web application and the Internet. It typically protects web applications from attacks such as cross-site forgery, cross-site-scripting (XSS), file inclusion, and SQL injection, among others.

 A WAF is a layer 7 or application layer based defnse. And it is not designed to defend against all types of attacks. These policies aim to protect against vulnerabilities in the application by filtering out malicious traffic. A WAF that operates based on a blocklist (negative security model) protects against known attacks.

Think of a blocklist WAF as a security officer at a factory instructed to deny admittance to anyone walking by who does not have the necessary permits or references. Conversely, a WAF based on an allowlist (positive security model) only admits traffic that has been pre-approved. Both blocklists and allowlists have their advantages and drawbacks, which is why many WAFs offer a hybrid security model, which implements both.

Since they are installed locally they minimize latency, but network-based WAFs are the most expensive option and also require the storage and maintenance of physical equipment. A host-based WAF may be fully integrated into an application`s software.

This solution is less expensive than a network-based WAF and offers more customizability. The downside of a host-based WAF is the consumption of local server resources, implementation complexity, and maintenance costs. Cloud-based WAFs offer an affordable option that is very easy to implement; they usually offer a turnkey installation that is as simple as a change in DNS to redirect traffic. Cloud-based WAFs also have a minimal upfront cost, as users pay monthly or annually for security as a service. Cloud-based WAFs can also offer a solution that is consistently updated to protect against the newest threats without any additional work or cost on the user`s end. The drawback of a cloud-based WAF is that users hand over the responsibility to a third party, therefore some features of the WAF may be a black box to them.

Netzary and Web Application Firewalls

Netzary in partnership with a host of vendors offers web application firewalls which come in all kinds of shapes, sizes, modes and budgets.

If your budget is really low, and you are running Linux based applications, then you can literally start with a zero budget for a web application firewall set up by us. We support half a dozen free and open source web application firewalls.

One of the cheaper host based proprietary web application firewalls we support is Bit Ninja. A Hungarian and London based vendor Bit Ninja offers excellent and very cost effective WAF solutions for VPS and shared hosting users. It provides good security for PHP based applications especially Wordpress and Joomla among popular PHP stacks that are always susceptible to various forms of cyber attacks.

Enterprise Class Support

We have partnered with Cloudflare and Imperva to provide enterprise class web application firewalls (WAF) solutions. While Cloudflare offers cloud based WAF, Imperva offers both appliance and cloud based WAF solutions.

Our expertise in designing defense systems allows us to deliver WAF solutions at rates ranging from Zero Dollars to a million dollar budgets, and using various models that would help you to protect your web based assets.

Our extended Security Operation Center can further monitor your WAF and also act on incidents in a proactive fashion.

Serving as a reverse proxy for your web traffic all requests flow through a web application firewall. Most web application firewall vendors operate from a network of data centers in each region, and hence the latency between the nearest data center and where your web application is stored hardly matters.

If you are interested in learning more about how we can help you protect your assets against a web application attack, talk to us, we will get you the best offer on a web application firewall.