Why Your WAF is Not Effective Bot Protection & How to Fix It

A web application firewall (WAF) is a security tool designed to detect and filter malicious traffic using a set of rules.

Some security professionals still rely on their WAF for protection against unwanted bot traffic, and a good WAF can block familiar threats, such as known malicious user agents and IP addresses. However, WAFs are not designed to detect real-time automated threats, and they struggle to recognize most of today’s sophisticated bots.

Why? Because WAFs are generally unable to answer this simple question: 

Is this visitor a human or a bot?

WAFs are designed to protect web applications from attacks that are trying to exploit common software vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and session hijacking. The WAF analyzes incoming traffic, looking at both GET and POST-based HTTP requests, and applies a set of predefined rules to filter out suspicious traffic with familiar attack signatures.

But many bots are not targeting vulnerabilities, and they don’t carry attack signatures.

Instead, bots (such as ticket scalping bots) are aiming to mimic the behavior of real, human users for various reasons—they click on ads, scrape unprotected content, and use stolen credentials to try logging into protected areas—and none of these behaviors will be detected by a WAF.

WAFs are also typically IP-centric. However, thanks to botnets, IoT deployments, and IPv6, bot operators with malicious intent can easily rotate through hundreds, thousands, or even millions of different IPs to work around WAF filters. IP-based rules are simply no match for today’s bots.

While WAFs can effectively patch vulnerabilities and block traffic from known undesirable user agents, IP addresses, and even entire countries, they are unequipped to detect and deal with adaptive bots that are are targeting flaws in your business logic, not just exploiting software vulnerabilities.

What WAFs Don’t Do—the Benefits of Secure Bot Protection

WAFs take a binary rules-based and policies-based approach to the traffic they analyze.

• Is this IP address allowed to communicate on this protocol—yes or no?
• Is this file malicious—yes or no?
• Does this visitor violate one of our policies—yes or no?

On the other hand, effective bot management requires a much more granular analysis to detect different bot types based on their respective behavior and intentions. In fact, bot detection and identification are very complex tasks. Bots are now massively distributed. Bot developers are increasingly savvy, deliberately designing their bots to bypass standard WAFs—and their strategies are continuously evolving.

As a result, binary-rules-driven WAFs can’t keep up. (It’s also not realistic for an online business’ IT department with myriad other tasks to develop an effective in-house solution.)

Only purpose-built bot detection solution can pool data from protected endpoints across the globe and use machine learning to continuously update its algorithm in real time to detect both known bots and new, unfamiliar threats.

WAFs may give you as a user full control with their rules-based approach, but they also require daily maintenance to keep up with the constantly evolving bots. The worst part is, with a WAF as your bot protection, new threats can only be identified after the damage is done.

A specialty solution that uses machine learning will automatically blocks malicious bots will protect your assets against all the different types of threats that modern bots represent.

To summarize, WAFs were designed for application protection, not bot detection. They are useful for protecting applications against certain types of (basic) attacks, and can block some of your unwanted bot traffic. But WAFs can’t adapt or scale to the immense volume and variety of the current bot landscape.

The DataDome solution, on the other hand, is designed to detect absolutely all bots, identify their purpose, and block unwanted attacks. DataDome still protects your websites and applications from the common attacks and exploits WAFs typically detect, such as SQL injection and application intrusion, in addition to advanced and evolving threats.

To optimize security and performance on your mobile apps, websites, servers, and APIs, while also managing your time and resources efficiently, opt for advanced, specialized bot protection—providing the same protection a standard commercial WAF provides plus critical protection against all other (and future) types of bot and online fraud attacks.

Contact us for additional information regarding our solution, or start your free trial in just a few minutes and begin to monitor your site’s bot activity now.