Web applications are now an essential part of our lives and have become more popular over the last ten years. It also encompasses commercial and individual operations that enable several aspects of business, including financial services, payments, advertising, and communication through social media. This has led to web applications becoming very popular, and at the same time, they attract hackers.

Verizon, in their 2024 Data Breach Investigation Report, indicated that are now an essential part of our lives and have become more popular over the last ten years. It also encompasses commercial and individual operations that enable several aspects of business, including financial services, payments, advertising, and communication through social media. This has led to web applications becoming very popular, and at the same time, they attract hackers.

Verizon, in their 2024 Data Breach Investigation Report, indicated that almost 40 % of cybercrimes stem from web applications. The companies that have integrated these applications into their day-to-day business operations must put in place adequate security measures to keep the app stack safe and secure from any threat to the continuity of the service.

A web application firewall, abbreviated as WAF, is the primary weapon in defending web applications. It is instrumental in counteracting multiple threats.

Some of the most recognizable dangers to Web Applications

Before we dive into how web application firewalls protect our web assets, let’s look at the most pressing security threats facing web applications in 2024.

Credentials are at the forefront of people’s minds, given that 100 million of these are being sold on the dark web. Among the most reported and destructive cyberattacks this year is a third-party application’s credentials breach to UnitedHealth that threatened one-third of Americans’ data. Adversaries lingered inside the victims’ systems for months before making a move, underlining how the real-time monitoring ability is important to flag any abnormal activity.

Another method of getting into the web apps that attackers have been popular in the last couple of years is through zero-day exploits. A zero-day vulnerability is one that is not known to the application vendor or the public when the attackers seek to exploit it. They can definitely pose a threat when they go unnoticed or when there’s no immediate fix to them. For the year 2023, 97 actual zero days were reported, a 50% increase from the number presented in the previous year.

Also, as web applications have become dependent on each other to deliver maximum functionality to the end user, API-related attacks are common. Application integrations should be managed efficiently with the essential characteristics of authentication and authorization. Input validation is also needed to block injection attacks.

Modern WAF solutions are essential to improve security

A web application firewall is a physical or virtual appliance that examines HTTP traffic going to and from web applications and the Web. WAFs provide two essential security features: traffic filtering and real-time monitoring.

WAFs apply rule-based filters to the incoming and outgoing HTTP requests and responses. These filters can identify and prevent such attacks as SQL injection, cross-site scripting- XSS, and cross-site request forgery – CSRF. The idea is that a WAF solution can identify and examine the traffic in real-time, detect threats, and eliminate them to address the situation when an attack is launched at a time when it is still impossible to discover a crack in the web application.

Any account comes with an unusual traffic pattern, or if an account is up to no good, the WAF can easily alert management to such occurrences and proactively initiate actions. These could range from halting the threat, notifying the security personnel, or any other measures that would help contain the threat.

Here, what businesses receive with a modern WAF is a smart, self-learning protection system that shields organizations from present and predicted dangers.

The state-of-art of WAF systems

It shows that the adversary state is almost perfect at concealing its actions. For instance, it works with millions of IPs, which enables it to evade geo-location restrictions. It also understands how to perform an unlawful web request without using the signs that would alert security solutions.

As mentioned above, threats are also growing very fast, and so WAFs are also being developed to offer better and more complex protection. Various features of modern WAF solutions include artificial intelligence for threat identification and automatic updates on threats. These technologies assist the WAF in reducing possible false positive events and other key tasks, such as policy and rule-making.

Modern WAFs utilize the next-generation machine learning approach to analyze clients’ behavior and prevent attacks. Indeed, the WAF develops precise behavioral parameters of legitimate clients over the duration of their previous operational sessions. As it stands, hostile users will diverge from the legitimate use of the application at some point in time. Once this occurs, the web application firewall will have locked them out of the network.

These capabilities are a major step forward in zero-day attack solutions in that the threat is identified prior to the vulnerability’s deformation, dictating that the attack is within the rules of the playing field in terms of already available rules.

Other precautions that can be taken to protect your web application

Even the best web app firewalls, for all their effectiveness, form a layer of a solid security strategy. The data presented by the WAFs is of great value and easily integrates with security information and event management software (SIEM). Here, the WAF traffic can be compared with traffic from other logging sources to identify the sources of the threats, their kinds, and the kind of answers that are required.

Additional measures you should take to maximize the security of your web applications include:

• Regular security audits: It is a complete check and review of your application’s code, configuration, incoming queries, and infrastructure through tests. An important aspect is that they assist in revealing risks or insecure areas in systems that can be exploited by attackers. Due to chronic code and configuration updates, it is crucial to perform periodic vulnerability assessments, and it is even more crucial to do it after more comprehensive alterations.

• Patch management: APPs and cybersecurity services also release updates and patches from time to time to fix some issues or to incorporate other security features. Regular updates keep the hackers out by fixing the weak points that are known in the system. Depending on the changes you will make, make sure that you create backups for your application data, databases, and configurations so that if something bad happens, you can restore the application to its previous state.

• Secure coding practices: Ensure you avoid mistakes common with application code by putting in place measures that make your code more secure. Ensure the developers get acquainted with secure coding standards, and that code is audited on a regular basis. Such attacks as SQL injections are still experienced because of poor application coding processes. Even though the solution to these problems is rather easy, numerous applications continue to be open to attack because of ignorance and improper actions.

Final thoughts

Web applications are the foundation of almost everything connected to the Internet. The aforementioned statistics reveal that about forty percent of attacks begin with a web application’s vulnerability. This statistic also highlights the importance of web apps for business functioning, communication, and transactions.

Measures such as the Web Application Firewall are not luxuries but ought to form basic protection mechanisms against the massive leakage of our material, both verbally and in writing. WAFs are deployed with various technologies to enable quick identification and neutralization of threats. This is the only way forward, given how innovatively attackers use new developments in AI and machine learning to their advantage.