It is the dynamic, interactive web application that is making the Internet the universal medium. Web applications bring a new level of risk to web sites. Security of these web applications is paramount to the security of the site. Awareness of security threats from the Internet is increasing the adoption of secure technologies. Deploying firewalls is a standard first step adopted by many organizations.
Firewalls protect against many attacks on the network and system infrastructure.
In addition, some firewalls provide filtering capability and contain inbound malicious Java and Active-X applications. However, firewalls do little to protect against inbound malicious requests to legitimate applications. Web-based applications are very popular due to the ubiquity of the Internet. Providing access to customer information, user profiles, financial records and health records are common examples of services that web applications can provide. Most often, these applications access a back end database to serve dynamically generated content to the users.