Top 10 Best Web Application Firewall (WAF) Providers
According to industry reports, the average cost to U.S.-based companies from a single data breach last year was $5.9 million. This includes the cost of remediation, as well as damages related to lost data, service disruption, and reputational harm.As more enterprises run their business applications and maintain sensitive data in the cloud, websites and web applications have become primary targets of sophisticated cyber attacks.
Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are designed to secure both internal and public web applications and data, helping businesses avoid costly data breaches and downtime. Deployed in front of web servers, WAFs protect against hacking attempts, monitor access to applications, and collect access logs for compliance, auditing, and analytics.
WAFs are essential for detecting and blocking carefully crafted threats that mimic legitimate website traffic to bypass traditional defenses. They effectively block threats such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and remote file inclusion that exploit vulnerabilities in web applications. Additionally, WAFs thwart attacks like site scraping, comment spam, and application-layer DDoS attacks executed by malicious botnets.
Furthermore, WAFs can identify and patch "self-inflicted" vulnerabilities in an enterprise's custom-built web applications, and they help e-commerce merchants comply with PCI-DSS requirements.
Originally deployed as physical appliances in enterprise data centers, WAFs are now also available as virtual appliances, cloud-based services (often integrated with a CDN), or as dedicated modules within Application Delivery Controllers.
The WAF market is growing rapidly, offering a broad range of products with varying levels of security capabilities. Choosing the right product depends on your company's business priorities, requirements, and budget.
To help you get started, here is a list of the ten best commercial Web Application Firewalls.
Imperva provides a cloud-based WAF solution that protects websites from various cyber threats, including DDoS attacks and data breaches. It leverages machine learning to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities. For two years running, Imperva has been positioned as the only leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls. Its PCI-compliant SecureSphere WAF appliance protects business-critical enterprise applications and data from any type of web threat, including application-layer DDoS attacks. Imperva uses dynamic application profiling to "learn" application behavior, ensuring the lowest false-positive rate in the industry.
What makes Imperva unique is that it also offers its best-of-breed web application security technology as a cloud-based service. Known as Imperva Incapsula, this simple-to-deploy service is well-suited for enterprises and SMBs alike, offering the same enterprise-grade security as Imperva SecureSphere at an affordable price point.
The Sucuri Website Firewall is a cloud-based WAF designed primarily for smaller customers, such as bloggers, e-commerce sites, and other business customers that need to protect a single website. Sucuri serves as a proxy between your website and the rest of the web, filtering out malicious attacks and traffic and sending only legitimate traffic to your website.
Using a proprietary approach to application profiling, malicious URL filtering, and anomaly detection, Sucuri protects your site from hacking attempts, vulnerabilities, and possible blacklisting by search engines.
Akamai's Kona Site Defender provides WAF capabilities within its cloud platform, offering bot management, DDoS protection, and application-layer security. It is tailored to defend applications from both automated and targeted attacks. Akamai's Kona Site Defender is an enterprise-focused cloud security service that protects websites against vulnerabilities and attacks. It also mitigates application-layer DDoS attacks using rate controls. The Kona Web Application Firewall (WAF) identifies and blocks application-layer attacks in HTTP and HTTPS traffic, such as SQL injections and cross-site scripting (XSS).
With the help of Akamai's Professional Services team, enterprises can create custom security rules tailored to their policies and use cases. High performance, even under attack, is assured through the use of Akamai's globally distributed network.
Barracuda Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects websites and applications against data breaches and defacements. It uses heuristic fingerprinting and IP reputation techniques to distinguish legitimate users from botnets, enabling it to block application-layer DDoS traffic.
Barracuda also includes strong authentication and access control capabilities to secure access to sensitive applications or data. Virtual patching protects applications from zero-day threats. Available as a hardware or virtual appliance, Barracuda can be deployed on-premises, in a private cloud, or in third-party cloud environments such as AWS or Microsoft Azure.
F5's BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) is an enterprise-grade WAF appliance deployed in the data center. BIG-IP ASM allows organizations to protect web applications from OWASP Top 10 risks, zero-day attacks, and vulnerabilities.
F5 also offers a cloud-based WAF service, known as Silverline, which protects applications hosted in a private cloud, public cloud, or physical data center. Silverline features the same security capabilities as BIG-IP ASM, such as detection of malicious bots, application-layer DDoS protection, and data leakage prevention. It is supported by F5's security team.
Radware's AppWall WAF solution is offered as a physical or virtual appliance for on-premise deployment. It protects web applications and helps enterprises comply with PCI requirements by mitigating web application security threats and zero-day attacks while detecting and blocking vulnerability exploits. AppWall gives you full coverage against injections, cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, and other OWASP top 10 threats, while helping to protect against leaks and manipulation of sensitive data. Proprietary technology is used to automatically generate and maintain enterprise network security policies and create granular protection rules.
Trustwave offers a physical or virtual on-premises Web Application Firewall appliance that can be deployed in both inline or out-of-line modes. Using threat intelligence from its SpiderLabs® security team and multiple detection engines, Trustwave delivers advanced protection against application vulnerabilities and emerging threats, including the OWASP Top 10.
It allows enterprises to monitor applications, detect and prevent threats, mitigate data risk, and address PCI compliance requirements. Trustwave offers virtual patching to protect vulnerable applications from attack without having to wait for the next release.
The Citrix NetScaler AppFirewall is an appliance-based WAF that helps enterprises secure their applications and data without impairing performance or user experience. The appliance is deployed in front of your web server and monitors all incoming and outgoing traffic (including SSL-encrypted traffic). NetScaler AppFirewall enforces both positive and negative security models to ensure correct application behavior, allowing it to deliver zero-day protection against unpublished exploits. Automatically updated signatures are also used to detect known vulnerabilities and threats. NetScaler AppFirewall ensures PCI-DSS compliance through a dedicated reporting tool.
Cloudflare's WAF leverages a global network to protect applications from known vulnerabilities, DDoS attacks, and malicious bots. It offers protection for applications hosted on any cloud platform or infrastructure. CloudFlare's PCI-certified, cloud-based WAF runs the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set, in conjunction with its own rules, heuristics, and reputation database. There is also an option to write custom security rules (depending on your service plan).
CloudFlare's WAF inspects application traffic before it arrives at your web server, applies rules to identify malicious visitors, and blocks or challenges those visitors based on the pre-defined rule action. The WAF protects against common web threats such as SQL injection, comment spam, excessive bot crawling, and application-layer DDoS attacks.
The Newcomers
HaltDos offers Web Application Firewall (WAF) and DDoS Protection on a single platform. It is a fully managed solution that uses state-of-the-art anomaly detection techniques to block application layer attacks with zero false positives. It protects your website from common and zero-day web exploits that affect application availability, compromise security, or consume application server resources.
Additionally, it periodically audits your website to provide comprehensive security.
DotDefender is a WAF software solution that is installed directly on your IIS and Apache servers across private, cloud, and VPS environments. It protects websites and web applications from known and unknown attacks, denial of service, hacking attempts, and data loss.
DotDefender monitors all incoming and outgoing application traffic, using pattern recognition to detect zero-day exploits. Session protection helps avoid impersonation. Signature-based techniques are used to block known attacks and vulnerabilities. To ease installation, DotDefender comes with built-in security rules that don't require configuration.
Indusface Total Application Security is the industry's first truly integrated web application security and compliance solution. It helps organizations detect application layer vulnerabilities accurately and patch them instantly without any change in code. Additionally, it continuously monitors for emerging threats and DDoS attacks to mitigate them.
Verizon's WAF services are part of its Digital Media Streaming platform, providing security against common web threats and content delivery acceleration. It aims to protect applications from the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities.