We can leverage a wide range of technologies to safeguard and protect websites and web apps. These technologies could operate at different layers—network, application, and transport—to create a layered/defense-in-depth security strategy.
CDN – Content Delivery Networks: A CDN distributes web content to users from geographically closer servers to improve load times and availability while also providing security benefits. In fact, CDN offers security features like traffic encryption, DDoS mitigation, Bot Management, and WAF integration.
TLS Encryption: Transport Layer Security establishes trust between the user and the website, ensuring confidentiality and data integrity, essential for e-commerce, banking, and sensitive data transmissions.
WAF – Web Application Firewall: WAFs provide application-layer security by blocking attacks targeting application vulnerabilities, a key defense against the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities. It inspects incoming and outgoing traffic for malicious content such as SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.
Bot Management: Bots account for a significant portion of web traffic, and malicious bots can perform tasks like brute-force attacks, DDoS, and scraping of sensitive content. A Bot management solution analyzes behavioral patterns, client-side signals (e.g., JavaScript execution), and reputation databases to differentiate between malicious bots (e.g., account takeover, credential stuffing) and legitimate traffic.
DDOs protection: Uses traffic analysis, rate limiting, and geo-blocking to identify and block malicious traffic at scale. These solutions often use globally distributed edge networks to absorb large attacks.
Secure APIs: These solutions protect web APIs from unauthorized access and ensure secure communication between microservices or web components. Technologies like OAuth 2.0 or JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) secure API endpoints by ensuring that only authorized clients can access them. API gateways can also enforce rate limiting and access control policies.