Source Blocking: Shifting from Reactive to Proactive Protection
In today’s complex digital landscape, characterized by undefined application perimeters and the intricacy of third-party dependencies, safeguarding your applications has become an ongoing challenge fought on multiple fronts and layers. As the frequency, volume, and distribution of cyber-attacks continue to rise, preventing malicious traffic from reaching your applications has become a vital aspect of cybersecurity.
To effectively combat these threats, a proactive cybersecurity strategy is imperative. By eliminating threats at the entry point, you not only enhance security but also significantly reduce the overheads and infrastructure costs caused by the processing of malicious traffic. Unfortunately, many security operations center (SOC) teams in larger organizations often find themselves in a constant reactive stance, tirelessly defending their applications against relentless cyber threats.
What is Proactive Protection and How to Achieve It?
Proactive protection involves blocking malicious source IPs and devices from sending harmful requests to your application in the first place. There are various ways to approach it.
While certain traditional protection methods like bulk blocking of geos, networks, and IP groups exhibit some level of proactiveness, they are often too broad and lack the needed accuracy, automation, and flexibility.
But then there are more sophisticated methods of proactive protection that can be applied. For example, when it comes to certain bot attacks, other forms of proactive protection include the use of crypto-challenges that exhaust the nefarious bot machines and bring them to a halt, user-identity validation, or iOS and Android device and app attestation for protecting native mobile apps.
Other valuable methodologies include cyber intelligence feeds that may come from your security vendors or third-party intel service subscriptions. At Radware, for example, we offer our customers our own proprietary active attackers feed. This feed is based on aggregated real-time information from the millions of malicious web transactions mitigated daily for thousands of customers worldwide, as well as from our global honeypot deception network.
A New Level of Proactive Protection
You have already recognized the importance of consolidating application protection solutions and establishing a centralized visibility and management hub. This is your way of enhancing security, ensuring consistency of protection, and reducing overheads caused by internal security silos resulting from managing multiple environments and disparate security solutions.
Think about this, the traffic flowing into your organization’s dozens and hundreds of applications, every day generate hundreds and sometimes even thousands of security events of bot attacks, injection attempts, cross-site scripting, API abuses, etc. You are practically sitting on a cyber-intelligence gold mine, perfectly tailored to your applications’ traffic.
If you were able to harness that wealth of data and connect the dots in real-time, you could preemptively block malicious sources before they attack your applications and do so in a precise manner that does not stand in the way of legitimate traffic.
With Radware, it is possible!
Radware’s AI-Based Correlation Engine
Radware’s AI-driven threat analysis algorithms preemptively and automatically block malicious sources across all applications within an account. By cross-correlating security events in real-time from all active protection modules (WAF, API Protection, and Bot Manager), our proprietary real-time source-blocking technology automatically analyses the source IP threat level, and if deemed malicious, it blocks it in all enabled apps for a set duration. Whether that nefarious source IP initially attacked one or all applications. This technology adds a robust defense layer against evolving cyber threats that is completely automatic and friction-free. It maximizes the effectiveness of your existing protections and leverages your ecosystem intelligence to achieve accurate security, thereby reducing unnecessary costs.
Today, more security teams embrace holistic proactive strategies and tools to fortify their organizations’ defenses and stay ahead of today’s evolving threats.
Contact us to learn more about proactive application protection strategies and solutions.
