What Is a Web Application Attack?

Web applications are at the heart of business today, facilitating communication, increasing productivity, enabling commerce, and driving business operations. In recent years, web application attacks have become more targeted and automated. Hackers now use automated bots to randomly crawl websites, searching for any of the tens of thousands of known vulnerabilities in software and APIs, as well as new vulnerabilities that can help to breach an organization’s defenses. To defend against these evolving threats, your security teams need automated technology that can adapt and evolve along with attack methods.

Akamai App & API Protector provides a holistic set of powerful application protections built with intelligent automation and simplicity and designed for today’s modern applications and APIs.

When deploying a web application security solution, the right technology will include the following critical capabilities.

Easier scalability. A flexible, scalable platform is essential in web security, allowing you to scale defenses to match traffic demands and provide continuous protection without loss of performance. Additionally, your web application security technology should protect assets on-premises as well as in private and public clouds.

Adaptive protection. Web application security technology today must offer more than traditional signature-based detection. For the most accurate and reliable security outcomes, you need advanced forms of adaptive web app and DDoS protection driven by machine learning, data mining, and heuristics. Web application firewall (WAF) rules should be updated with continuous real-time threat intelligence from security researchers. And your solution should offer fully customizable, predefined rules to meet a wide array of requirements for specific use cases.

API protection. Because APIs are essential for web apps, you need a security solution with robust API discovery, protection, and control capabilities. The best technology will include functionality to automatically discover and profile unknown or changing APIs while providing real-time alerts, reporting, and dashboards at the API level.

Flexible management. To make life easier for your overburdened security teams, your security solution should offer simple and automated workflows that maximize your investment and improve operational efficiencies. Ideally, your technology should integrate with on-premises and cloud-based security information and event management (SIEM) applications. And the right technology will provide the flexibility to manage web application security via high-touch controls or fully automated protections.

Akamai App & API Protector is a SaaS-based solution that combines continuous visibility with comprehensive insights to identify and stop the most sophisticated web application attacks. Designed to protect entire web and API estates and to ensure a superior user experience, our technology combines industry-leading core technologies in web application firewall, bot mitigation, DDoS protection, API security, and more. Powered by a new Adaptive Security Engine, this Akamai solution is purposely built for simplicity and ease of use, and driven by customer-focused automation.

With web application security from Akamai, your security teams can:

• Defend against a broad range of threats. Our solution stops the most dangerous threats to your web applications, including volumetric DDoS, injection, automated botnets, API-based attacks, and other cyberattacks.
• Minimize maintenance efforts. Automated updates make it easy to maintain strong security with less effort. Automatic self-tuning minimizes alert fatigue and allows your teams to stay focused on real attacks rather than on false alarms.
• Reduce the API attack surface. While APIs are essential to delivering powerful web experiences, they can also expose back-end data and logic. App & API Protector automatically discovers and protects APIs from vulnerabilities, including the OWASP API Security Top 10.
• Maximize security investments. App & API Protector lets your teams get more done with fewer products. Our solution includes a wide range of protections, including web application and API protections, bot visibility and mitigation, SIEM connectors, DDoS protection, web optimization, API acceleration, edge compute, and DNS security that ensures a fast DNS service that is also highly responsive and available 24/7.

Adaptive security. App & API Protector employs adaptive, threat-based detection with a multidimensional threat scoring model and decision-making logic that accurately identifies and stops stealthy attacks with surgical-grade protection. Threat intelligence from Akamai Connected Cloud  — the world’s most distributed compute platform — helps to detect up to two times more attacks compared to traditional rulesets.

Self-tuning capabilities. An adaptive security engine keeps pace with rapidly evolving threats while reducing false positives. Using machine learning, true and misidentified security triggers are automatically and continually analyzed to deliver highly accurate policy-by-policy tuning recommendations that can be implemented with one click. The result is a 5x reduction in false positives, significantly reducing the effort required to maintain and tune policies.

Automated API security. App & API Protector continuously discovers known, unknown, and evolving APIs. All API requests are automatically inspected for malicious code, and optional security controls can be enforced at the edge to activate positive API security models.

Bot mitigation. Our industry-leading bot technology monitors all bot activity, relying on an expansive directory of 1,500+ known bots to identify good bots and prevent malicious bot activity. The ability to create and customize bot definitions allows you to permit access to third-party and partner bots without obstruction.

Automatic updates. Our adaptive security engine is automatically updated with the latest protections, based on our threat researchers’ daily analysis of more than 300 TB of attack data. These managed updates result in less administrative overhead and operational friction.