What is Advanced Bot Protection with WAF?

Web application firewalls (WAFs) are a critical security tool for protecting web applications from a wide range of attacks. However, WAFs can be bypassed by bots, which are automated software programs that can mimic human behaviour. Advanced bot protection with WAF is a security solution that combines the power of a WAF with the ability to detect and block malicious bots.

Advanced bot protection with WAF can help to protect web applications from a wider range of threats, including:

• Web scraping: This is a technique used by bots to extract data from web pages.
• Credential stuffing: This is a technique used by bots to try to login to accounts using stolen credentials.
• DDoS attacks: This is a type of attack where bots are used to flood a website with traffic in order to make it unavailable.
• Phishing attacks: This is a type of attack where bots are used to send emails or text messages that appear to be from a legitimate source in order to trick users into giving up their personal information.

How does advanced bot protection with WAF work?
Advanced bot protection with WAF works by using a variety of techniques to detect and block malicious bots. These techniques can include:

• Signature-based detection: This technique uses known signatures of malicious bots to identify and block them.
• Anomaly detection: This technique identifies bot traffic that is outside of the normal behavior of legitimate users.
• Machine learning: This technique uses artificial intelligence to learn and adapt to new bot threats.
• User behavior analytics: This technique analyzes the behavior of individual users to identify suspicious activity.
  

In addition to these techniques, advanced bot protection with WAF can also use other features, such as:

• Rate limiting: This limits the number of requests that can be made from a single IP address in a given period of time.
• Blacklists and whitelists: This allows you to block or allow traffic from specific IP addresses or domains.
• Geolocation: This allows you to block or allow traffic from specific countries or regions.
  
  
  

Benefits of using advanced bot protection with WAF are: Can protect against a wide range of bot-based attacks, can be used to block malicious bots without affecting legitimate traffic, can help to improve the performance of web applications and can help to reduce the risk of data breaches.

Use cases for advanced bot protection with WAF:

• Protecting e-commerce websites: E-commerce websites are a prime target for bot-based attacks, such as web scraping and credential stuffing. Advanced bot protection with WAF can help to protect these websites from these attacks.
• Protecting financial institutions: Financial institutions are also a prime target for bot-based attacks, such as phishing and denial-of-service attacks. Advanced bot protection with WAF can help to protect these institutions from these attacks.
• Protecting government websites: Government websites are also a target for bot-based attacks, such as credential stuffing and denial-of-service attacks. Advanced bot protection with WAF can help to protect these websites from these attacks.

Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help customers defend against the latest automated threats. Available as part of Web Application Firewall and WAF-as-a-Service solutions, the new functionality fights malicious bot activity in several ways.

There are four key components to Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection:

• Bot spam detection reduces referrer spam and blocks comment spam, helping keep analytics data and website comment sections clean.
• Credential stuffing is one of the most popular bot attacks as cybercriminals take stolen passwords and try to use them access other sites or applications. By blocking these types of attacks, credential stuffing prevention helps stop account takeover attacks.
• Request risk scoring tracks incoming requests and uses advanced behavioral analytics to detect attacks or suspicious activity.
• Client finger printing tracks users more accurately than IP addresses. IP addresses may point to many users, but client finger printing is tied to a single user.