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Application SecurityWAFWeb Application Firewall

Bot Manager vs. WAF: Why You Actually Need Both

June 6, 2019 — by Ben Zilberman — 1

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Over 50% of web traffic is comprised of bots, and 89% of organizations have suffered attacks against web applications. Websites and mobile apps are two of the biggest revenue drivers for businesses and help solidify a company’s reputation with tech-savvy consumers. However, these digital engagement tools are coming under increasing threats from an array of sophisticated cyberattacks, including bots.

While a percentage of bots are used to automate business processes and tasks, others are designed for mischievous purposes, including account takeover, content scraping, payment fraud and denial-of-service attacks. Often, these attacks are carried out by competitors looking to undermine a company’s competitive advantage, steal information or increase your online marketing costs.

[You may also like: 5 Things to Consider When Choosing a Bot Management Solution]

When Will You Need a Bot Detection Solution?

Sophisticated, next-generation bots can evade traditional security controls and go undetected by application owners. However, their impact can be noticed, and there are several indicators that can alert a company of malicious bot activity:

Why a WAF Isn’t an Effective Bot Detection Tool

WAFsare primarily created to safeguard websites against application vulnerability exploitations like SQL Injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery, session hijacking and other web attacks. WAFs typically feature basic bot mitigation capabilities and can block bots based on IPs or device fingerprinting.

However, WAFs fall short when facing more advanced, automated threats. Moreover, next-generation bots use sophisticated techniques to remain undetected, such as mimicking human behavior, abusing open-source tools or generating multiple violations in different sessions.

[You may also like: The Big, Bad Bot Problem]

Against these sophisticated threats, WAFs won’t get the job done.

The Benefits of Synergy

As the complexity of multi-vector cyberattacks increases, security systems must work in concert to mitigate these threats. In the case of application security, a combination of behavioral analytics to detect malicious bot activity and a WAF to protect against vulnerability exploitations and guard sensitive data is critical.

Moreover, many threats can be blocked at the network level before reaching the application servers. This not only reduces risk, but also reduces the processing loads on the network infrastructure by filtering malicious bot traffic.

Read “How to Evaluate Bot Management Solutions” to learn more.

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Application SecuritySecurityWeb Application Firewall

Credential Stuffing Campaign Targets Financial Services

October 23, 2018 — by Daniel Smith — 6

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Over the last few weeks, Radware has been tracking a significant Credential Stuffing Campaign targeting the financial industry in the United States and Europe.

Background

Credential Stuffing is an emerging threat in 2018 that continues to accelerate as more breaches occur. Today, a breach doesn’t just impact the compromised organization and its users, but it also affects every other website that the users may use.

Additionally, resetting passwords for a compromised application will only solve the problem locally while criminals are still able to leverage those credentials externally against other applications due to poor user credential hygiene.

Credential Stuffing is a subset of brute force attacks but is different from Credential Cracking. Credential Stuffing campaigns do not involve the process of brute forcing password combinations. Credential Stuffing campaigns leverage leaked username and passwords in an automated fashion against numerous websites in an attempt to take over users accounts due to credential reuse.

Criminals, like researchers, collect and data mine leaks databases and breached accounts for several reasons. Typically cybercriminals will keep this information for future targeted attacks, sell it for profit or exploit it in fraudulent ways.

The motivations behind the current campaign that Radware is seeing are strictly fraud related. Criminals are using credentials from prior data breaches in an attempt to gain access and take over user’s bank accounts. These attackers have been seen targeting financial organizations in both the United States and Europe. When significant breaches occur, the compromised email addresses and passwords are quickly leveraged by cybercriminals. Armed with tens of millions of credentials from a recently breached website, attackers will use these credentials along with scripts and proxies to distribute their attack in an automated fashion against the financial institution in an attempt to take over banking accounts. These login attempts can happen in such volumes that they resemble a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

Attack Methods

Credential Stuffing is one of the most commonly used attack vectors by cybercriminals today. It’s an automated web injection attack where criminals use a list of breached credentials in an attempt to gain access and take over accounts across different platforms due to poor credential hygiene. Attackers will route their login request through proxy servers to avoid blacklisting their IP address.

Attackers automate the logins of millions of previously discovered credentials with automation tools like cURL and PhantomJS or tools designed specifically for the attack like Sentry MBA and SNIPR.

This threat is dangerous to both the consumer and organizations due to the ripple effect caused by data breaches. When a company is breached, those credentials compromised will either be used by the attacker or sold to other cybercriminals. Once credentials reach its final destination, a for-profit criminal will use that data, or credentials obtain from a leak site, in an attempt to take over user accounts on multiple websites like social media, banking, and marketplaces. In addition to the threat of fraud and identity theft to the consumer, organizations have to mitigate credential stuffing campaigns that generate high volumes or login requests, eating up resources and bandwidth in the process.

Credential Cracking

Credential Cracking attacks are an automated web attack where criminals attempt to crack users password or PIN numbers by processing through all possible combines of characters in sequence. These attacks are only possible when applications do not have a lockout policy for failed login attempts.

Attackers will use a list of common words or recently leaked passwords in an automated fashion in an attempt to take over a specific account. Software for this attack will attempt to crack the user’s password by mutating, brute forcing, values until the attacker is successfully authenticated.

Targets

In recent campaigns, Radware has seen financial institutions targeted in both the United States and Europe by Credential Stuffing campaigns.

Crimeware

Sentry MBA is one of the most popular Credential Stuffing toolkits used by cybercriminals today. This tool is hosted on the Sentry MBA crackers forum. The tool simplifies and automates the process of checking credentials across multiple websites and allows the attackers to configure a proxy list so they can anonymize their login requests.

SNIPR – Credential Stuffing Toolkit

SNIPR is a popular Credential Stuffing toolkit used by cybercriminals and is found hosted on the SNIPR crackers forums. SNIPR comes with over 100 config files preloaded and the ability to upload personal config files to the public repository.

Reasons for Concern

Recent breaches over the last few years have exposed hundreds of millions of user credentials. One of the main reasons for concern of a Credential Stuffing campaign is due to the impact that it has on the users. Users who reuse credentials across multiple websites are exposing themselves to an increased risk of fraud and identity theft.

The second concern is for organizations who have to mitigate high volumes of fraudulent login attempts that can saturate a network. This saturation can be a cause for concern, as it will appear to be a DDoS attack, originating from random IP addresses coming from a variety of sources, including behind proxies. These requests will look like legitimate attempts since the attacker is not running a brute force attack. If the user: pass for that account does not exist or authenticate on the targeted application the program will move on to the next set of credentials.

Mitigation

In order to defend against a Credential Stuffing campaign, organizations need to deploy a WAF that can properly fingerprint and identify malicious bot traffic as well as automated login attacks directed at your web application. Radware’s AppWall addresses the multiples challenges faced by Credential Stuffing campaigns by introducing additional layers of mitigation including activity tracking and source blocking.

Radware’s AppWall is a Web Application Firewall (WAF) capable of securing Web applications as well as enabling PCI compliance by mitigating web application security threats and vulnerabilities. Radware’s WAF prevents data from leaking or being manipulated which is critically important in regard to sensitive corporate data and/or information about its customers.

The AppWall security filter also detects such attempts to hack into the system by checking the replies sent from the Web server for Bad/OK replies in a specific timeframe. In the event of a Brute Force attack, the number of Bad replies from the Web server (due to a bad username, incorrect password, etc.) triggers the BruteForce security filter to monitor and take action against that specific attacker. This blocking method prevents a hacker from using automated tools to carry out an attack against Web application login page.

In addition to these steps, network operators should apply two-factor authentication where eligible and monitor dump credentials for potential leaks or threats.

Effective Web Application Security Essentials

  • Full OWASP Top-10 coverage against defacements, injections, etc.
  • Low false positive rate – using negative and positive security models for maximum accuracy
  • Auto policy generation capabilities for the widest coverage with the lowest operational effort
  • Bot protection and device fingerprinting capabilities to overcome dynamic IP attacks and achieve improved bot detection and blocking
  • Securing APIs by filtering paths, understanding XML and JSON schemas for enforcement, and activity tracking mechanisms to trace bots and guard internal resources
  • Flexible deployment options – on-premise, out-of-path, virtual or cloud-based

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Cloud SecuritySecurityWeb Application Firewall

Using Application Analytics to Achieve Security at Scale

October 16, 2018 — by Eyal Arazi — 2

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Are you overwhelmed by the number of security events per day? If so, you are not alone.

Alert Fatigue is Leaving You Exposed

It is not uncommon for security administrators to receive tens of thousands of security alerts per day, leading to alert fatigue – and worse – security events going unattended.

Tellingly, a study conducted by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) found that over 40% of security professionals think alerts lack actionable intelligence that can help them resolve security events. More than 30% of security professionals ignore alerts altogether because so many of them are false positives. Similarly, a study by Fidelis Cybersecurity found that almost two-thirds of organizations review less than 25% of alerts every day and only 6% triage 75% or more of alerts per day that they receive.

As a result of this alert flood, many organizations leave the majority of their security alerts unchecked. This is particularly a problem in the world of application security, as customer-facing applications frequently generate massive amounts of security events, based on user activity. Although many of these events are benign, some are not—and it only takes one alert to open the doors to devastating security events, like a data breach.

Not examining these events in detail leaves applications (and the data they store) exposed to security vulnerabilities, false positives, and sub-optimal security policies, which go unnoticed.

Many Events, but Few Activities

The irony of this alert flood is that when examined in detail, many alerts are, in fact, recurring events with discernible patterns. Examples of such recurring patterns are accessed to a specific resource, multiple scanning attempts from the same origin IP, or execution of a known attack vector.

Traditionally, web application firewall (WAF) systems log each individual event, without taking into consideration the overall context of the alert. For example, a legitimate attempt by a large group of users to access a common resource (such as a specific file or page), and a (clearly illegitimate) repeated scanning attempts by the same source IP address, would all be logged the same way: each individual event would be logged once, and not cross-linked to similar events.

How to Achieve Security at Scale

Achieving security at scale requires being able to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to security events. That is, distinguishing between large amounts of routine user actions which has little implication for application security, and high-priority alerts which are indicative of malicious hacking attempts or may otherwise suggest a problem with security policy configuration (for example, such as a legitimate request being blocked).

In order to be able to make this separation, there are a number of questions that security administrators need to ask themselves:

  1. How frequently does this event occur? That is, does this behavior occur often, or is it a one-off event?
  2. What is the trend for this event? How does this type of behavior reflect over time? Does it constantly occur at a constant rate, or is there a sudden massive spike?
  3. What is the relevant header request data? What are the relevant request methods, destination URL, resource types, and source/destination details?
  4. Is this type of activity indicative of a known attack? Is there a legitimate explanation for this event, or does it usually signify an attempted attack?

Each of these questions can go either way in terms of explaining security events. However, administrators will do well to have all of this information readily available, in order to reach an informed assessment based on the overall context.

Having such tools – and taking the overall context into consideration – confers security professionals with a number of significant benefits:

  • Increased visibility of security events, to better understand application behavior and focus on high-priority alerts.
  • More intelligent decision making on which events should be blocked or allowed.
  • A more effective response in order to secure applications against attacks as much as possible, while also making sure that legitimate users are not impacted.

Radware’s Application Analytics

Radware developed Application Analytics – the latest feature in Radware’s Cloud WAF Service to address these customer needs.

Radware’s Cloud WAF Application Analytics works via a process of analysis based on machine-learning algorithms, which identify patterns and group similar application events into recurring user activities:

  1. Data mapping of the log data set, to identify all potential event types
  2. Cluster analysis using machine learning algorithms to identify similar events with common characteristics
  3. Activity grouping of recurring user activities with common identifiers
  4. Data enrichment of supplemental details on activities to provide further context on activities

Radware’s Cloud WAF Application Analytics takes large numbers of recurring log events and condensing them into a small number of recurring activities.

In several customer trials, this capability allowed Radware to reduce the number of Cloud WAF alerts from several thousand (or even tens of thousands) to a single-digit (or double digit) number of activities. This allows administrators to focus on the alerts that matter.

For example, one customer reduced over 8,000 log events on one of their applications into 12 activities (seen above), whereas another customer reduced more than 3,500 security events into 13 activities.

The benefits for security administrators are easy to see: rather than drown in massive amounts of log events with little (or no) context to explain them. Cloud WAF Application Analytics now provides a tool to reduce log overload into a manageable number of activities to analyze, which administrators can now handle.

Ultimately, there is no silver bullet when it comes to WAF and application security management: administrators will always need to balance being as secure as possible (and protect private user data), with the need to be as accessible as possible to those same users. Cloud WAF Application Analytics are Radware’s attempt to disentangle this challenge.

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Application SecurityAttack MitigationSecurityWeb Application Firewall

Are Your Applications Secure?

October 3, 2018 — by Ben Zilberman — 12

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Executives express mixed feelings and a surprisingly high level of confidence in Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report. 

As we close out a year of headline-grabbing data breaches (British Airways, Under Armor, Panera Bread), the introduction of GDPR and the emergence of new application development architectures and frameworks, Radware examined the state of application security in its latest report. This global survey among executives and IT professionals yielded insights about threats, concerns and application security strategies.

The common trend among a variety of application security challenges including data breaches, bot management, DDoS mitigation, API security and DevSecOps, was the high level of confidence reported by those surveyed. 90% of all respondents across regions reported confidence that their security model is effective at mitigating web application attacks.

Attacks against applications are at a record high and sensitive data is shared more than ever. So how can execs and IT pros have such confidence in the security of their applications?

To get a better understanding, we researched the current threat landscape and application protection strategies organizations currently take. Contradicting evidence stood out immediately:

  • 90% suffered attacks against their applications
  • One in three shared sensitive data with third parties
  • 33% allowed third parties to create/modify/delete data via APIs
  • 67% believed a hacker can penetrate their network
  • 89% saw web-scraping as a significant threat to their IP
  • 83% run bug bounty programs to find vulnerabilities they miss

There were quite a few threats to application services that were not properly addressed, challenging traditional security approaches. In parallel, the adoption of emerging frameworks and architectures, which rely on numerous integrations with multiple services, adds more complexity and increases the attack surface.

Current Threat Landscape

Last November, OWASP released a new list of top 10 vulnerabilities in web applications. Hackers continue to use injections, XSS, and a few old techniques such as CSRF, RFI/LFI and session hijacking to exploit these vulnerabilities and gain unauthorized access to sensitive information. Protection is becoming more complex as attacks come through trusted sources such as a CDN, encrypted traffic, or APIs of systems and services we integrate with. Bots behave like real users and bypass challenges such as CAPTCHA, IP-based detection and others, making it even harder to secure and optimize the user experience.

[You might also like: WAFs Should Do A  Lot More Against Current Threats Than Covering OWASP Top 10]

Web application security solutions must be smarter and address a broad spectrum of vulnerability exploitation scenarios. On top of protecting the application from these common vulnerabilities, it has to protect APIs and mitigate DoS attacks, manage bot traffic and make a distinction between legitimate bots (search engines for instance) and bad ones like botnets, web-scrapers and more.

DDoS Attacks

63% suffered a denial of service attack against their application. DoS attacks render applications inoperable by exhausting the application resources. Buffer overflow and HTTP floods were the most common types of DoS attacks, and this form of attack is more common in APAC. 36% find HTTP/Layer-7 DDoS as the most difficult attack to mitigate. Half of the organizations take rate-based approaches (such as limiting the number of request from a certain source or simply buying a rate-based DDoS protection solution) which are ineffective once the threshold is exceeded and real users can’t connect.

API Attacks

APIs simplify the architecture and delivery of application services and make digital interactions possible. Unfortunately, they also introduce a wide range of risks and vulnerabilities as a backdoor for hackers to break into networks. Through APIs, data is exchanged in HTTP where both parties receive, process and share information. A third party is theoretically able to insert, modify, delete and retrieve content from applications. This is nothing but an invitation to attack:

  • 62% of respondents did not encrypt data sent via API
  • 70% of respondents did not require authentication
  • 33% allowed third parties to perform actions (GET/ POST / PUT/ DELETE)

Attacks against APIs:

  • 39% Access violations
  • 32% Brute-force
  • 29% Irregular JSON/XML expressions
  • 38% Protocol attacks
  • 31% Denial of service
  • 29% Injections

Bot Attacks

The amount of both good and bad bot traffic is growing. Organizations are forced to increase network capacity and need to be able to precisely tell a friend from a foe so both customer experience and security are maintained. Surprisingly, 98% claimed they can make such a distinction. However, a similar amount sees web-scraping as a significant threat. 87% were impacted by such an attack over the past 12 months, despite a variety of methods companies use to overcome the challenge – CAPTCHA, in-session termination, IP-based detection or even buying a dedicated anti-bot solution.

Impact of Web-scraping:

  • 50% gathered pricing information
  • 43% copied website
  • 42% theft of intellectual property
  • 37% inventory queued/being held by bots
  • 34% inventory held
  • 26% inventory bought out

Data Breaches

Multinational organizations keep close tabs on what kinds of data they collect and share. However, almost every other business (46%) reports having suffered a breach. On average an organization suffers 16.5 breach attempts every year. Most (85%) take between hours and days to discover. Data breaches are the most difficult attack to detect, as well as mitigate, in the eyes of our survey respondents.

How do organizations discover data breaches?

  • 69% Anomaly detection tools/SIEM
  • 51% Darknet monitoring service
  • 45% Information was leaked publicly
  • 27% Ransom demand

IMPACT OF ATTACKS

Negative consequences such as loss of reputation, customer compensation, legal action (more common in EMEA), churn (more common in APAC), stock price drops (more common in AMER) and executives who lose their jobs are quick to follow a successful attack, while the process of repairing the damage of a company’s reputation is long and not always successful. About half admitted having encountered such consequences.

Securing Emerging Application Development Frameworks

The rapidly growing amount of applications and their distribution across multiple environments requires adjustments that lead to variations once a change to the application is needed. It is nearly impossible to deploy and maintain the same security policy efficiently across all environments. Our research shows that ~60% of all applications undergo changes on a weekly basis. How can the security team keep up?

While 93% of organizations use a web application firewall (WAF), only three in ten use a WAF that combines both positive and negative security models for effective application protection.

Technologies Used By DevOps

  • 63% – DevOps and Automation Tools
  • 48% – Containers (3 in 5 use Orchestration)
  • 44% – Serverless / FaaS
  • 37% – Microservers

Among the respondents that used micro-services, one-half rated data protection as the biggest challenge, followed by availability assurance, policy enforcement, authentication, and visibility.

Summary

Is there a notion that organizations are confident? Yes. Is that a false sense of security? Yes. Attacks are constantly evolving and security measures are not foolproof. Having application security tools and processes in place may provide a sense of control but they are likely to be breached or bypassed sooner or later. Another question we are left with is whether senior management is fully aware of the day to day incidents. Rightfully so, they look to their internal teams tasked with application security to manage the issue, but there seems to be a disconnect between their perceptions of the effectiveness of their organizations’ application security strategies and the actual exposure to risk.

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

Download Now

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Security Risks: How ‘Similar-Solution’ Information Sharing Reduces Risk at the Network Perimeter

August 23, 2018 — by Thomas Gobet — 1

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We live in a connected world where we have access to several tools to assist in finding any information we need. If we choose to do something risky, there is often some type of notification that warns us of the risk.

The same holds true in IT departments. When a problem occurs, we search for answers that allow us to make decisions and take action. What problem created the outage? Do I need to increase the bandwidth or choose a CDN offering? Do I need to replace my devices or add a new instance to a cluster?

Connected Security

We all know that connected IT can help us make critical decisions. In the past, we have depended on standalone, best-of-breed security solutions that detect and mitigate locally but do not share data with other mitigation solutions across the network.

[You might also like: Web Application in a Digitally Connected World]

Even when information is shared, it’s typically between identical solutions deployed across various sites within a company. While this represents a good first step, there is still plenty of room for improvement. Let us consider the physical security solutions found at a bank as an analogy for cybersecurity solutions.

A robber enters a bank. Cameras didn’t detect the intruder wearing casual clothes or anything identifying him or her as a criminal. The intruder goes to the first teller and asks for money. The teller closes the window. Next, the robber moves to a second window, demanding money and that teller closes the window. The robber moves to the third window, and so on until all available windows are closed.

Is this the most effective security strategy? Wouldn’t it make more sense if the bank had a unified solution that shared information and shut down all of the windows after the first attempt? What if this robber was a hacker who is trying to penetrate your system? Would you allow the hacker to try and break into more than one network silo after the first attempt?

Comprehensive Security Via An Enterprise-Grade Suite Solution

As we’ve seen in the example above, having mitigation solutions that can share attack information allows an organization to block a new “signature” when you see the request. But this only applies when the traffic reaches the solution. How could the bank better protect itself from the robber?

  • Should they do active verification at the entrance?
    • No, it would be time-consuming for customers who may consider not coming back.
  • Should they keep a list of customers allowed?
    • No, otherwise they would turn off new customers.
  • Should they signal the risk to other desks and entrance security?
    • Yes, that way all windows would be closed simultaneously and security guards would be able to catch the intruder and any future attempts to enter.

Imagine these windows are your different sites and the security guard placed at the entrance is your security solution at the perimeter of your network. Identifying abnormal behavior from normal behavior requires you to perform analysis of network traffic. The more advanced the analysis is the closer to the backend application the solution is. That way we can ensure only traffic allowed by prior solutions doing first security barriers gets through. Being close to the application means that analyzed traffic went through: router, firewalls, switches, IPs, anti-virus, anti-DLP and many other solutions (in classic architectures).

Organizations require a fully integrated WAF and DDoS mitigation appliance that can communicate effectively to allow WAF solutions (deployed close to the application) to warn anti-DDoS systems (deployed at the perimeter) that an attacker is trying to penetrate the perimeter.

In the blog “Accessing Application With A Driving License,” Radware recommends blocking any requests coming from clients with abnormal behavior. This mechanism was only applied to the WAF, but with this added communication, it goes even one step further and blocks bad requests and/or bad clients who are trying to access your network.

[You might also like: Accessing Application With a Driving License]

With a fully integrated WAF and DDoS detection and mitigation solution that communicates with one another, these devices will save you time and processing power and they will be more effective in blocking intrusions to your network.

Download “Web Application Security in a Digitally Connected World” to learn more.

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Application DeliverySSLWeb Application Firewall

Microsoft TMG Replacement Blues?

July 26, 2016 — by Prakash Sinha — 0

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Microsoft has discontinued Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) and Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG), solutions for remote application access control, security and optimization. Microsoft UAG/TMG evolved over many years to integrate multiple functions to protect Microsoft applications. It is a key component of several Microsoft application deployments including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Lync. However, the TMG and UAG deployments are not limited to protecting Microsoft applications.

Securing web applications accessible over the web is a complex task. A compromise may lead to a significant performance hit to the application, especially when under an attack that may impact business, or worse, security breaches.

Application DeliveryData CenterWeb Application Firewall

How Application Delivery and Security Work Hand-in-Hand

March 29, 2013 — by Nir Ilani — 1

At first glance, application delivery and security might seem unrelated because they appear to solve and address different challenges from different domains. But a closer look actually reveals that they are entwined. In this post I’ll break down the ways in which application delivery and security work hand-in-hand.

Application SecurityAttack MitigationBotnetsBrute Force AttacksDDoS AttacksHTTP Flood AttacksPhishingSecuritySecurity VirtualizationSEIMWeb Application Firewall

eCrime Congress in Germany: Restoring the Equilibrium of Attackers Vs. Defenders

February 8, 2013 — by Ron Meyran — 0

Last week, I attended eCrime Congress in Frankfurt, Germany. Held on January 30,Radware was one of the sponsors of the event, which featured a lecture track that ran throughout the day and included breaks for the sponsors’ pavilion.

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