Web Application & Database Firewalls

Companies are increasingly seeking digital transformation to improve the customer experience and to cut costs. Self-service and increased communication through the web has allowed customers to take control over their own records and interactions with organizations. Unfortunately, it has also allowed criminals to take the same control.

Using the web to interact with your customers means that criminals can pose as your customers as well. This lets them extract private information, including payment card information as well as issue instructions with the authority of your customer. Rarely reported though common is for orders of high value goods being sent to a criminal drop site using a legitimate customer’s account.

Confidence in the security of your web applications is critical to successful digital transformation, whether this is gaining permission from your board or CIO to digitize a process or convincing customers to adopt the newly digitized process.
This is true whether you’re selling through the web or you’re a council accepting development applications online.

Web application firewalls can provide this confidence, especially when the application has been developed specifically for you or is a customized version of off the shelf software. These types of applications are much more likely to have critical vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross site scripting, which may allow criminals to copy your entire database.
While penetration testing is a good control method to detect known vulnerabilities, your website could be frequently changing, and attacker’s methodologies are frequently changing. This means what is considered safe today may end up being vulnerable tomorrow.

Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) can mitigate this issue: They can either blacklist attacks, or whitelist good input. Even when your application changes and a new SQL injection is introduced, the web application firewall will block it. If the type of criminal attacks changes and the web application firewall has never seen traffic like this before, it will also get blocked. Thus, the WAF becomes a stable guardian in a rapidly changing world.

If you are about to implement digital transformation for your organization, or thinking about it, contact DataSecure to see how we can help you secure and accelerate your transition.