With the rapid growth of web and hybrid applications, cyberattacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), DDoS, and bot attacks have become more frequent and sophisticated. A Web Application Firewall (WAF) plays a critical role in protecting websites by filtering and monitoring HTTP/HTTPS traffic between users and web applications.
The following are the most commonly used WAF solutions.
- AWS WAF
- Cloudflare WAF
- Akamai Kona Site Defender
- Imperva WAF
- FortiWeb (Fortinet)
- F5 Advanced WAF
- Sucuri WAF
1. AWS WAF
AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a cloud security tool that helps you to protect the application against web attacks. WAF monitors and controls unusual bot traffic, and blocks common attack patterns, such as SQL Injection or Cross-site scripting, etc. It also lets you monitor the HTTP and HTTPS requests that are forwarded to an Amazon API Gateway API, Amazon CloudFront, or an Application Load Balancer.
Amazon WAF allows you to control your content by using an IP address from where the request originates. It also includes a full-featured API that you can use to automate the creation, deployment, and maintenance of security rules.
2. Cloudflare WAF
Cloudflare WAF (Web Application Firewall) is an advanced, cloud-based security service designed to protect websites, web applications, and APIs from a wide range of modern cyber threats.
Cloudflare WAF works by checking incoming both HTTP and HTTPS traffic at its globally distributed edge network. It analyzes each request to detect and stop malicious activity such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), credential-stuffing attacks, and automated bot traffic before the request reaches the origin server.
3. Akamai Kona Site Defender
Akamai Kona Site Defender is a DDoS and web application attack customization and protection solution designed for IT security professionals.
It enables users to detect and mitigate application threats in HTTP and HTTPS traffic, identify anomalies and changes, analyze and establish unidentified APIs automatically, perform in-depth security analysis, as well as augment monitoring and live attack response.
Features include service level agreement (SLA) optimization, dashboard capability, SIEM integration, IP Reputation capability, and offload security management.
4. Imperva WAF
Imperva provides an industry-leading Web Application Firewall, which prevents attacks with world-class analysis of web traffic to your applications. Beyond WAF, Imperva also provides comprehensive protection for applications, APIs, and microservices:
Its automated API protection ensures your API endpoints are protected as they are published, shielding your applications from exploitation. It can also prevent business logic attacks from all access points such as websites, mobile apps and APIs.
It also ensures complete visibility with machine learning and domain expertise across the application security stack to reveal patterns in the noise and detect application attacks, enabling you to isolate and prevent attack campaigns.
5. FortiWeb (Fortinet)
FortiWeb is another most popular web application firewall (WAF) that protects web applications and APIs from attacks that target known and unknown exploits and helps maintain compliance with regulations.
Using machine learning to model each application, FortiWeb defends applications from known vulnerabilities and from zero-day threats.
6. F5 Advanced WAF
F5 Advanced WAF is a robust security solution designed to protect modern web applications and APIs from advanced and evolving cyber threats.
It defends against OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, application-layer DDoS attacks, automated bots, credential-stuffing attempts, and API abuse by using behavioral analysis, threat intelligence, and machine-learning–based detection.
It offers deep visibility into application traffic, allowing security teams to create highly granular and customizable security policies. With flexible deployment options across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, along with strong bot defense and API security capabilities, F5 Advanced WAF is well suited for organizations running complex, high-value applications that require advanced threat detection and precise control without impacting user experience.
7. Sucuri WAF
The Sucuri Firewall is a cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) WAF and intrusion prevention system (IPS) developed exclusively for websites.
What makes the Sucuri Firewall especially effective is its reverse proxy architecture, which ensures all incoming traffic is inspected and cleaned before reaching your website, adding strong security without requiring changes to your server infrastructure.
It intercepts and inspects all incoming HTTP/HTTPS requests to a website. Then the WAF strips the malicious requests at the Sucuri network edge before it arrives at your server.
Conclusion
Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) play an important role in protecting web applications from cyber threats such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and data breaches. They work by monitoring and filtering HTTP traffic between the web application and the internet, allowing them to detect and block malicious requests in real time.
