Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Barracuda Web Application Firewalls offer a unified platform with a full suite of interoperable features, delivering robust and complete application security.

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Barracuda Web Application Firewall
On this page Kappa Data informs you Barracuda Web Application Firewall can help you to combine full Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) functionality with a complete set of advanced security services and solutions that protect your applications against today’s multiplying threats. 

Start with flexible, powerful WAF and API solutions.

Barracuda Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) solutions are available as appliances (hardware or virtual) that can be implemented on premises or hosted in the cloud, as a container and through an innovative SaaS solution that combines advanced functionality with ease of deployment and management. The containerized Barracuda Web Application Firewall can be deployed and managed using the SaaS version, providing the option to use either or both versions based on your needs.

 

With both deployment models, you get complete application security, including protection for the OWASP Top 10 Web and API threats, zero-day attacks, and many more vulnerabilities and automated threats, along with automatic detection and remediation. Compared to many competing solutions, Barracuda WAF solutions are remarkably simple to deploy, configure, and manage, with capabilities like the Machine Learning-powered Auto Configuration Engine.

Gain comprehensive protection against web app attacks.

Whether it’s a novice hacker testing their first SQL Injection on your login form or seasoned attackers exploiting a zero-day vulnerability, Barracuda Application Protection has you covered. This solution offers extensive protection against the OWASP Top 10 web attacks, zero-day threats, account takeover attempts, and more, powered by its advanced Smart Signature engine and positive security model.

 

In the face of real-time attacks, swift responses are crucial. Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence gathers threat data from a vast global network of sensors and customer traffic. This data is analyzed using machine learning in near real-time, allowing for the immediate distribution of updates to connected units for quick threat detection. Additionally, Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence provides the cloud-based machine learning backbone for Advanced Bot Protection and the Auto Configuration Engine, which reviews your application traffic and offers tailored configuration recommendations, minimizing administrative workload.

Prevent DDoS Attacks from Crippling Your Business with a Web Application Firewall

Barracuda protection against DdoS attacks

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks pose a persistent threat to businesses of all sizes. By rendering your applications unusable or inaccessible to legitimate users, these attacks can disrupt your operations for extended periods, leading to significant financial losses.

 

Barracuda WAAP solutions, featuring an advanced Web Application Firewall, offer robust, full-spectrum DDoS protection. This includes coverage from Layer 3 to Layer 7 traffic and blocks both volumetric and application-based DDoS attacks. With this comprehensive protection, your critical business applications remain accessible, effective, and uninterrupted, safeguarding against the disruptions DDoS attacks aim to cause.

Use your WAF for protection against malicious BOTS

Hackers are developing increasingly sophisticated bots that can imitate human app users to execute damaging attacks. The challenge lies not only in distinguishing between legitimate and malicious bots but also in identifying real human users amidst these advanced bots.

 

Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection, powered by a Web Application Firewall, leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning in the cloud to continuously enhance its ability to detect and block harmful bots, including human-mimicking “low and slow” bots, while ensuring that legitimate human and bot traffic flows smoothly with minimal disruption.

Secure App Delivery with Web Application Firewall

Barracuda Application Protection features a fortified SSL/TLS stack, delivering a secure HTTPS front end for your applications. With pre-built templates, you can easily configure secure TLS ciphers and protocols to meet compliance standards. The integrated CDN, boasting over 100 global points of presence (PoPs), ensures fast loading times for all users. To safeguard your application backends and data, Barracuda Application Protection seamlessly integrates with AD, LDAP, SAML, JWT, OpenID, and RADIUS, offering precise control over user and group access to specific data.

 

SAML support enables a smooth single-sign-on (SSO) experience across both on-premises and cloud-based applications, while multi-factor authentication enhances security through integrations with RSA SecureID, SMS PASSCODE, Duo, and others. Integration with Barracuda CloudGen Access adds an extra layer of security with zero-trust network access.

 

The built-in application delivery module includes features like HTTP load balancing, content routing, caching, and compression. The content routing module intelligently directs traffic based on its characteristics, such as routing PC and mobile clients to different servers. Additionally, connection pooling, caching, and compression speed up traffic delivery, reduce server load, and minimize latency, enhancing the overall user experience.

Powerful reporting capabilities with Barracuda WAF

Reports

In an era of rapidly expanding regulatory frameworks and data privacy rules, maintaining and proving compliance can be a challenging and resource-intensive task.

 

Barracuda Wab Application Firewall  simplifies this process by automatically generating detailed logs and offering customized reports on demand, making it easy to demonstrate regulatory compliance. The solution is also compatible with numerous external SIEMs and log management tools, including Azure Sentinel, Loggly, Sumologic, HPE ARCsight, IBM QRadar, Splunk, and many others.

 

Looking for deeper insights? Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence allows you to delve into specific applications, tracking every bot that visits your website, its attack frequency, and the amount of data transferred. This empowers you to make informed decisions to better protect your digital assets.

Web Application Firewall Features

Web Application Protection

  • OWASP Top 10 and Zero Day Attack Protection

    Protect against all OWASP Top 10 attacks, zero-day attacks, data leakage, and DDoS attacks. The layered traffic processing engine and Smart Signatures use fewer attack-detection signatures to detect and block web attacks, including zero-day attacks. Each Smart Signature can detect attacks found in 40 attack-specific signatures, reducing detection time and improving overall detection.  

  • Geo IP and IP Threat Intelligence

    Using client source addresses, organizations can control access to web resources. Barracuda Application Protection can control access based on GeoIP to limit access only to specified regions. It is also integrated with the Barracuda Reputational Database and can identify suspicious IP addresses, bots, TOR networks and other anonymous proxies that are often used by attackers to hide their identity and location. Capabilities include the ability to block proxies, VPNs, and entire networks based on the Autonomous System Numbers (ASN).

  • Data Leak Protection

    Inspects all outbound traffic for sensitive data leakage. Content such as credit card numbers, U.S. social security numbers, or any other custom patterns are identified and can be either blocked or masked without administrator intervention. Furthermore, the information is logged and can be used by administrators to find potential leaks. 

  • Website Supply chain protection

    Attackers exploit third-party scripts to perform client-side digital skimming attacks, such as Magecart, to steal PII and financial data directly from the browser. These attacks are difficult to detect because these scripts are loaded directly by the browser and attackers are using sophisticated techniques to avoid detection with scanners and similar defensive methods.  Barracuda Application Protection includes Client-Side Protection, a feature that automates the CSP and SRI configuration, reducing admin overhead and configuration errors. In addition to these capabilities, Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence provides visualization and reporting for these configurations, giving you deeper visibility into how these scripts are used.  

  • Antivirus for file uploads

    Available with all plans, the on-board Antivirus engine scans and detects viruses in file uploads.

  • Advanced Threat Protection for File Uploads

    Seamless integration with Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection to provide security against advanced zero-hour threats. By analyzing files in a CPU-emulation based sandbox, it can detect and block malware embedded deep inside files uploaded to applications. 

  • Risk-based attack protection

    Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence automatically classifies each incoming request with risk scores based on the request parameters. These risk scores are used by the backend ML models to identify advanced threats such as bots and complex attackers and block them. 

Full Spectrum DDos Protection

  • Unmetered Volumetric DDos Prevention

    Volumetric DDoS attacks are on the rise because the computational resources that are available to attackers make it very easy to launch full-scale attacks that can bring an entire network down. Many times, the entry points for these attacks are web sites of organizations that bear the brunt of the load. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service offers unmetered DDoS protection cloud service that scrubs traffic before it reaches the intended websites. This allows the cloud service to identify patterns of DDOS attacks in the connections and block them.

  • Unmetered Application DDos Attack Prevention

    Protect against advanced application-layer DDoS (Slowloris, RUDY and Slow Read) attacks, which are different from volumetric DDoS attacks, with heuristic fingerprinting and IP reputation to distinguish real users from botnets. Secure against application DDoS using a variety of risk assessment techniques such as application-centric thresholds, protocol checks, session integrity, active and passive client challenges, historical client reputation block lists, geo-location, and anomalous idle-time detection. 

  • Unlimited Rate-limiting Rules

    Barracuda Application Protection  offers rate limiting of incoming client requests based on IP and client fingerprint. Rate limiting is especially useful at peak times where some users may attempt to overload the application by sending rapid requests. Rate limiting can be enforced at an application or URL level using an unlimited number of rules.  

API Security

  • Protect JSON, and GraphQL API's

    Barracuda Application Protection protects XML, JSON, and GraphQL APIs against all application attacks, including OWASP Top 10 API threats.  

  • Schema-based API Discovery

    Import the schema for your JSON API to automatically create security rules based on the definition of the API. Supported schemas are OpenAPI and Google API formats. 

  • ML-powered API Discovery

    Shadow and zombie APIs are major threats for application defenders. Shadow APIs are the APIs deployed by web applications that are not known and secured. Zombie APIs are API endpoints that may no longer be in use, such as older versions of an API, but still actively respond to queries and are not secured. Barracuda Application Protection uses machine learning to detect these API endpoints from live traffic analysis and automatically secures them, reducing the attack surface drastically. 

  • Unlimited API Rate-limiting Rules

    APIs are built for access using automation. However, often this capability can be misused to overload an API and bypass SLAs or completely bring down an application. Barracuda Application Protection offers rate limiting capabilities for APIs that can be enforced on an endpoint level, reducing the ability of misbehaving clients to slow down or bring down an API. 

Advanced Bot Protection

  • Bot Protection - Web Scraping and SPAM Protection

    Web scraping and bot spam are the most common types of bot problems faced by applications. Barracuda Application Protection uses a combination of honeypots, behavioral analysis, and signatures to detect and block these bot attacks. 

  • Bot Signature database

    Barracuda Application Protection contains a regularly updated bot signature database that contains over 10,000 individual signatures. These signatures can be used to identify and block bots before they reach your application. 

  • Active Threat Intelligence

    Real-time attacks need real-time responses. Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence collects threat data from a large, worldwide network of sensors and customer traffic. This data is processed using machine learning in near-real time and pushed out to connected units immediately, allowing for rapid detection of new threats and attackers. 

  • CAPTCHA Insertion and Challenges

    Barracuda Application Protection has multiple methods of challenging bots and attackers to both slow and stop them down. These methods include JavaScript challenges and CAPTCHAs. 

    Integrations: reCAPTCHA v2 and v3; hCAPTCHA

  • Brute Force Prevention

    Brute Force attacks use trial and error to attempt to identify login credentials or hidden parts of an application as part of reconnaissance. Barracuda Application Protection can identify such attacks – whether they are coming from a single IP/source or multiple IPs/sources in low and slow attacks – and block them, rendering the application safe. 

  • Credential Stuffing Prevention

    Credential stuffing or password spraying attacks are forms of account takeover attacks that use databases of leaked and stolen credentials to attempt to identify password reuse and compromise applications. Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence has a database of previously leaked credentials that logins are validated against. If matches are found, these login attempts can be blocked and admins alerted. 

  • Privileged Account Protection

    A  more sophisticated form of account takeover attack targets specific individuals in an organization to steal credentials from and use for compromising the organization. Privileged Account Protection on the Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence cloud uses behavioral analytics to understand user login and browsing patterns. When the behavior of the user varies from the pattern, admins are alerted to identify and block attacks. 

  • Machine-Learning Bot Protection

    Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection uses cloud-based machine learning to stop bad bots, easily blocking automated spam, web and price scraping, inventory hoarding, account takeover attacks, and much more.

  • Client Identifcation and Control

    Most IP addresses contain multiple users and devices behind them. Blocking an entire IP address with hundreds of users for the sins of one user typically causes significant user issues. Barracuda Application Protection can identify individual devices behind an IP address and most modules can enforce blocking at a device level or IP level as desired. 

Secure Application Delivery

  • Content Delivery Network

    Barracuda Application Protection provides an integrated CDN for onboarded applications. The CDN has over 118 PoPs that can serve traffic to the nearest clients across 100 locations worldwide. 

  • Authentication, Authorization and Access Control

    Barracuda Application Protection provides granular AAA capabilities to offload authentication and authorization for applications. Capabilities include Client Certificates, JSON Web Tokens, SAML, and OpenID Connect. 

  • Integrated ZTNA

    Barracuda CloudGen Access is an innovative ZTNA solution that provides secure access to applications and workloads from any device and location. Barracuda Application Protection includes Barracuda CloudGen Access licenses to provide a secure access control surface for your internal applications that are published on the internet. 

  • Load Balancing with Server Health Monitoring

    Applications onboarded on Barracuda Application Protection can be configured with multiple servers to spread the load and improve uptime. Barracuda Application Protection also includes Server Health Monitoring capabilities that continuously monitor application servers to switch traffic over in case of failure, improving uptime. 

  • Content Routing

    Content Routing on Barracuda Application Protection uses a number of parameters on the incoming request to identify and redirect traffic to various parts of an application. This could be anything from redirecting a user to the mobile application based on the HTTP UserAgent or routing traffic for A/B testing or enabling blue-green deployments. 

  • Containerized Deployment

    Many applications today are deployed using containers and microservices. While traffic from the internet to the applications (North-South traffic) is typically protected, the traffic between the microservices (East-West traffic) is not. Barracuda Application Protection provides an additional deployment module, the Containerized WAF that can work in conjunction with the SaaS model to secure this critical path. 

Automation, Reporting, Analytics, and Services

  • Log Export to SIEM

    Barracuda Application Protection allows all application logs (traffic and firewall) to be exported to external SIEM solutions for further retention and analysis. Multiple SIEM integrations are available out of the box and logs can be exported as JSON, Syslog, or AMQP/S. 

  • Advanced Reporting and Visualization

    Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence Dashboard gives you at-a-glance visibility into traffic patterns and the types of clients who visit your website. A single pane of glass provides you with a birds-eye view of traffic patterns. You can also drill down into specific applications and see every bot that has visited your website, how often it attacks, and how much data has been transferred, helping you make informed decisions on how to protect your digital property. 

  • Auto Configuration Engine

    Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence delivers the cloud Machine Learning layer for Advanced Bot Protection and the Auto Configuration Engine. Auto Configuration Engine is a service that reviews all your application traffic from connected units and provides application-specific configuration recommendations, reducing admin overhead. 

  • Virtual Scanning and Patching Configuration

    Complex deployments, frequent updates to apps, and fast deployment of new apps can easily introduce vulnerabilities. Barracuda Application Protection leverages our advanced vulnerability scanner to constantly monitor your entire deployment for vulnerabilities.  When it finds vulnerabilities – even in apps that are still in development – it can remediate them automatically or with a single click. Detailed reporting of vulnerability discovery and remediation helps you demonstrate compliance. 

  • Configuration API

    Barracuda Application Protection is built API-First. What this means in practice is that every capability on the product can be configured and tuned using the Configuration API. Available to all users, code samples and modules for popular automation tools are also provides on our GitHub page for easy integration with your automation toolchain. 

  • Configuration Snapshots

    All configuration changes on Barracuda Application Protection are stored as snapshots. These snapshots are created in JSON and are editable – and use our configuration API in the backend. This capability allows easy integration with DevOps/SecOps tools and enables easily repeatable deployments to enforce uniform security policies. 

Frequently asked questions

Check our FAQ section where you can find the first questions that have been asked to us during the last months.

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  • How does Barracuda WAF help protect against common web application threats?

    Barracuda WAF helps protect against common web application threats by using advanced threat detection techniques to block malicious traffic. It defends against OWASP Top 10 threats, such as SQL injection and XSS, by inspecting incoming traffic for malicious payloads and blocking attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in web applications.

  • How does the Barracuda WAF ensure compliance with the NIS2 directive’s security requirements?

    The Barracuda WAF ensures compliance with the NIS2 directive’s security requirements by providing robust protection for web applications that are critical to an organization’s operations. The NIS2 directive mandates that organizations protect their information systems from cyber threats, and Barracuda WAF helps meet this requirement by securing web applications against attacks that could lead to service disruptions or data breaches.

  • What are the benefits of using Barracuda WAF for organizations subject to the NIS2 directive?

    The benefits of using Barracuda WAF for organizations subject to the NIS2 directive include enhanced protection against web application threats, improved compliance with security and incident reporting requirements, and increased resilience of critical services. By securing web applications, Barracuda WAF helps organizations reduce the risk of cyber incidents that could impact the continuity of essential services, aligning with the goals of the NIS2 directive.

  • What is the Barracuda Web Application Firewall (WAF)?

    The Barracuda Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a security solution designed to protect web applications from a wide range of cyber threats, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), DDoS attacks, and other vulnerabilities. It acts as a barrier between web applications and potential attackers, ensuring that only legitimate traffic reaches the application.

  • What role does Barracuda WAF play in protecting critical infrastructure under the NIS2 directive?

    Barracuda WAF plays a crucial role in protecting critical infrastructure by securing the web applications that support essential services. The NIS2 directive requires that organizations protect the availability and integrity of critical services, and by preventing web application attacks, Barracuda WAF ensures that these services remain operational and secure from cyber threats.

  • Why is a Web Application Firewall (WAF) important for organizations?

    A WAF is important for organizations because it provides essential protection for web applications, which are often targeted by cybercriminals seeking to exploit vulnerabilities. By filtering and monitoring HTTP/HTTPS traffic, a WAF can prevent attacks that could lead to data breaches, service disruptions, or unauthorized access, thus safeguarding sensitive information and maintaining application availability.

Contact us for a demo

Are you curious to learn whether how Barracuda Application firewall can help you to protect your web surface and fit the technological requirements of NIS 2? Contact us for a demo via the below button. 

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