If your enterprise relies on web applications, you're probably familiar with traditional network firewalls. There's a reason for that: firewalls play a vital role in filtering external threats that attempt to attack your entire infrastructure. But as more and more of your critical operations move online and use complex web apps and APIs, gaps appear that basic firewalls just can't address. Today's new AI-powered threats require a new approach to security.
Without visibility into custom application logic and data flows, critical vulnerabilities can be exploited, leading to theft of sensitive information, financial fraud, and even business disruption. While perimeter firewall defenses are still necessary, relying solely on firewall defenses to protect increasingly powerful web properties means playing a high-stakes game of chance (with very real consequences).
Add a purpose-built web application firewall (WAF) designed to analyze requests in the full context of your app environment and powered by AI for even greater accuracy, and you can protect your security and build advanced digital capabilities with confidence. A layered, defense-in-depth approach that combines network- and application-level protections will help you securely deliver the seamless, personalized digital experiences that are the foundation of lasting customer relationships and operational excellence in 2024.
Gaps in Traditional Firewall Defense
You probably already have traditional firewall protection in place that protects your entire network (if you run online services). These firewalls filter incoming traffic based on a set of predefined rules that focus primarily on protocols, port numbers, IP address ranges, and basic connection states.
For example, common firewall rules limit external access to private intranet resources, block unwanted traffic types such as online gaming protocols, detect large-scale network scans, and mitigate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
This perimeter protection works well against traditional network-centric cyber threats. But traditional firewalls have no context about the application logic, user workflows, or data structures specific to your custom web apps and APIs. They simply scan network packets as they arrive and attempt to allow or block them accordingly, leaving them vulnerable to the evolving tactics of AI-enabled attackers.
Without knowledge of the inner workings of your applications, critical vulnerabilities can slip through traditional firewall defenses.
- SQL Injection Attacks: Injects malicious code allowing remote access, data destruction, and information theft
- Authentication is broken: Enabling unauthorized system access through stolen credentials
- Sensitive data leakThrough improper encryption, backups, or logging
- Cross-site scripting (XSS)Injecting JavaScript or HTML to spread malware, hijack sessions, scrape data, or deface sites
Once inside the application itself, hackers can also target configuration issues, flawed business logic flows, gaps in identity management, and insecure object-level access. AI-powered attacks can exploit these vulnerabilities with incredible speed and precision that your firewall can't predict.
These exploitable application flaws allow attackers to steal sensitive business data or personal information, illegally mine cryptocurrency on servers, hold systems hostage, hijack client accounts, deny legitimate access and corrupt back-end resources. AI only amplifies these risks.
Yet traditional firewalls remain crucial as a first line of network perimeter defense, but for businesses that operate online through modern web apps, additional safeguards tailored to application threats and enhanced by AI threat detection are essential.
Why a WAF Provides Critical Protection
Web application firewalls address application layer vulnerabilities and logic holes that basic network firewalls miss. WAFs are specifically designed to protect web apps, APIs, microservices, and rich internet applications. AI further enhances their ability to identify and respond to these threats.
A WAF deeply inspects all traffic flowing to your web properties using a targeted set of rules and a negative security model that defines suspicious behavior. From there, it analyzes requests for signs of common exploits and attacks that attempt to misuse your application's behavior or functionality. AI-powered analysis can detect subtle patterns that would normally go unnoticed. These include:
- Extreme traffic spikes that could indicate a DDoS attack
- Suspicious geographic location of IP address
- Repeated input transmissions just below the lockout threshold
- Unusual HTTP headers, user agents, or protocols
- Known malicious payloads in POST requests
- Attempts to traverse the directory structure in an unpredictable way
- Special characters and patterns that indicate SQL injection or cross-site scripting
Advanced WAFs combine this real-time threat detection with global threat intelligence to identify new exploits and malicious actors as soon as new attack patterns emerge. AI and machine learning algorithms also enable some solutions to derive additional behavioral rules by studying specific application traffic patterns over time. In this ever-changing landscape, the adaptability of AI is crucial.
As traffic passes through, the WAF blocks risky requests and allows legitimate users through with minimal latency impact, protecting the application itself and ensuring both data and functionality are protected from compromise. An AI-powered WAF does this with incredible speed and accuracy, and can keep up with the constantly changing threat landscape.
Most WAF products also include features such as virtual patching, behavioral anomaly detection, automatic policy tuning, third-party integrations, and positive security models to detect validated use cases.
Comparison of key features of traditional firewalls and WAFs
| Features | Traditional Firewall | Web Application Firewall (WAF) |
| Operational layers | Network (Layer 3/4) | Application (Layer 7) |
| Traffic Analysis | Packets, Ports, and IP Addresses | HTTP/HTTPS requests, content, parameters, and headers |
| Attack Defense | Network-Level Attacks | Web application specific attacks (SQLi, XSS, CSRF, etc.) |
| Customization | limited | Widespread |
| Additional Features | May provide basic intrusion prevention capabilities | Often includes bot mitigation, DDoS protection, and API security |
| AI Integration | Limited or non-existent | It's quite popular. It's used to enhance threat detection and incident response. |
Creating an Application Security Ladder
Web applications power many critical business functions including internal operations management, customer experience, partner integration, etc. As your dependency on these application ecosystems increases, so does your business' exposure to risk from underlying vulnerabilities.
Strengthening application security eliminates major blind spots and enables businesses to pursue advanced digital transformation that supports key objectives, including:
- Increased self-service and convenience Through the expansion of the customer portal
- Accelerating development speed Use CI/CD pipelines and microservices
- Enabling real-time data exchange Through IoT integration and open API ecosystem
- Increased revenue Personalized interface and recommendation engine
Combining the network layer perimeter defense of a traditional firewall with the enhanced protection of a specialized WAF creates a security ladder effect. Traditional firewalls filter allowed traffic at the network level based on IP, protocol, and volume heuristics, which protects against basic attacks such as worms, reconnaissance scans, and DDoS events.
The WAF then takes over at the application layer, scrutinizing the entire context of the request to identify attempts to exploit the app's logic and functionality itself through injection attacks, stolen credentials, anomalous workflows, or other sneaky techniques that security teams encounter on a daily basis.
This combined layered defense-in-depth approach protects both the entire network and the complex web apps that run an ever-increasing portion of their business, allowing organizations to devote more development resources to improving capabilities rather than just fixing vulnerabilities.
lastly
Security incidents are becoming more costly every year, and as companies become more reliant on web apps to manage their operations, serve customers, and drive revenue, application vulnerabilities pose serious (and immediate) business risks.
Securing your systems with advanced, application-aware defense powered by AI means security supports, rather than hinders, your key strategic initiatives.
By protecting your web properties with a scalable, secure defense, you can confidently build capabilities that support your goals of improving customer experiences, streamlining operations, increasing sales, and expanding your partner channels. This means you can focus on driving your business forward, safe in the knowledge that you've done your part to secure your perimeter and web apps in an AI-driven world.
