WAF: Securing Applications at the Edge

Sheraline Barthelmy Sheraline is the head of product, marketing and customer success at Cox Edge, an edge cloud startup from Cox Communications. At Cox Edge, she's focused on developing the tools and systems that customers and developers rely on to build the next generation of edge applications. These days, brick-and-mortar or television-based bank robberies and heists seem old-fashioned no matter how well planned or executed. What the new “money” criminals are after is personal data. And the “banks” being attacked are the growing number of web applications. Studies show that web application attacks have become the single most significant cause of data breaches. According to NTT’s 2020 Global Threat Intelligence Report (GTIR), more than half (55%) of all attacks in 2019 were a mix of web application and application-specific attacks, up from 32% the year before. As organizations move away from VPNs, virtual machines and centralized management systems to distributing and even running applications at the edge, conventional perimeter-based security like network firewalls isn’t enough. The best defense is a firewall that can mitigate application-layer attacks. Web Application Firewall (WAF) A WAF helps protect web applications from application-layer attacks like cross-site scripting, SQL injection attacks, remote file inclusion and cookie Continue reading