AI-powered WAFs vs traditional firewalls: Protecting your web applications

AI-powered WAFs vs traditional firewalls: Protecting your web applications

If your business relies on web applications, you’re probably familiar with traditional network firewalls. And for good reason – they play an invaluable role filtering external threats looking to attack your overall infrastructure. But as more and more of your essential operations shift online to intricate web apps and APIs, gaps have opened up that basic firewalls simply can’t see into. The new AI-powered threats of today demand a new approach to security. Without visibility into your custom application logic and data flows, major vulnerabilities can be exploited, allowing sensitive information theft, financial fraud, and even operational disruption. While you still need perimeter firewall defenses, exclusively relying on them to safeguard increasingly powerful web properties leaves you playing a risky game of chance (with very real consequences). By adding specialised web application firewalls (WAFs) designed to analyse requests in the full context of your app environments – and enhanced by AI for even greater accuracy – you can lock things down and confidently build out advanced digital capabilities. With a layered defense-in-depth approach combining network and application-level protections, you can securely deliver the types of seamless, personalised digital experiences that form the foundation of lasting customer relationships and operational excellence in 2024.

Why WAFs provide critical protection

Web application firewalls address the application layer vulnerabilities and holes in logic that basic network firewalls miss. WAFs are designed specifically to protect web apps, APIs, microservices, and rich internet applications. AI further enhances their ability to identify and respond to these threats.

A  WAF will deeply inspect all traffic flowing to web properties using targeted rulesets and negative security models defining suspicious behaviour. From there, they analyse requests for indicators of common exploits and attacks seeking to abuse application behaviour and functionality. AI-powered analysis can detect subtle patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. These might include:

  • Extreme traffic spikes indicating possible DDoS events
  • Suspicious geolocations of an IP addresses
  • Repeated input submissions just below lockout thresholds
  • Unusual HTTP headers, user agents, or protocols
  • Known malicious payloads in POST requests
  • Attempts to traverse directory structures in unpredictable ways
  • Special characters and patterns indicating SQL injection or cross-site scripting

Advanced WAFs combine this real-time threat detection with global threat intelligence to identify emerging exploits and bad actors as soon as new attack patterns appear. AI and machine learning algorithms even allow some solutions to derive additional behavioral rules by examining your specific application traffic patterns over time. AI’s adaptability is crucial in this constantly shifting landscape.

As traffic passes through, the WAF blocks dangerous requests while allowing legitimate users through with minimal latency impact. This protects the application itself, shielding both data and functionality from compromise. AI-powered WAFs can do this with remarkable speed and accuracy, keeping pace with the ever-changing threat landscape.