A study by Clark School suggests that there is a hacker attack every 39 seconds over the internet which affects one in three Americans every year. Due to the growth in popularity of the internet, there are a lot of criminal or unwanted activities going on over the internet. The HTTP protocol is simple and this leads to easier stealing and spoofing identity. With the increase in the number of businesses over the internet protecting online information has become very critical and this needs to be addressed.

According to many online resources the number one targeted server-­side vulnerabilities are Web Applications such as content management system(CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Magneto, etc.), Wikis, Portals, discussion forums, banking systems and many more. This makes detecting and preventing these activities a critical task for every company.

No application code is a completely secure code. It is a normal thing to have bugs in your Web Application, even the best developers are prone to errors.

What does a Web Application Firewall (WAF) exactly do?

The OWASP provides a broad technical definition for a WAF as “a security solution on the web application level which - from a technical point of view - does not depend on the application itself.”

A WAF keeps a track of the HTTP traffic that comes to your website/web application. Basically, it monitors all the requests that are coming to your web application/website. If the WAF feels that the incoming requests are suspicious ie. if the incoming request can harm your website (eg. the request may contain some code that can make some changes to your database or an unauthorized person/hacker would be able to gain access to your web application) WAF blocks those requests and prevents your website from unwanted attacks. Basically WAF filters and blocks suspicious or unwanted HTTP traffic to and from a web application.

Why do you need a Web Application Firewall (WAF)?

Hackers find vulnerabilities and application security flaws in the website and then they attack the website using techniques such as SQL injection, XSS(cross-site scripting ), file inclusion and security misconfigurations. Having a WAF will prevent such attacks from causing harm to your website.

WAF acts as a barrier between your website and the hacker by protecting your website from hacks, Cross-site scripting, SQL injections, DOS attacks, etc. This is all done on a continuous basis, giving you the best chance to protect your website before an attack is successful.

You would probably feel that hackers go after only big companies or websites and they wouldn’t be interested in your website, but this is a big misinterpretation. Most hackers do not try to steal social security numbers or credit card information of millions of people at a go. The majority of hacks occur for seemingly less malign purposes. For example, many hackers infiltrate your server in order to send out spam emails by the millions. They might inject unwanted code that will affect the performance and reliability of your website.

Some stats you might want to know, 43% of cyber attacks target small business, 64% of companies have experienced web-based attacks, 62% experienced phishing & social engineering attacks, 59% of companies experienced malicious code and botnets and 51% experienced denial of service attacks.

How we protect your website from hacking?

1. Protection Against Owasp Top 10

   Owasp Top 10 are critical issues and risks to and web-application. These are pointed but non-profit organization Open Web Application Security Project(Owasp) which works on improving security. It includes many popular attacks like SQL Injection, Cross-site Scripting, XML External Entities, Security misconfiguration and others. miniOrange WAF adds a layer on top of the application and protects against these attacks and prevent any misuse of vulnerability.

2. Rate Volume limiting

   Many attacks involve large number requests on the website, application or server to bring the site down. These are Denial of Service(Dos) and Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS), brute force attacks and others that target the application layer. In miniOrange WAF, you can set your own limit, provide a response and analyze the incoming request violating the limit. By controlling the traffic you can protect your application from these attacks.

3. Realtime Blocking

   Most of the time the website is hacked to use the resources of a server. With attacks taking place every second in different parts of the world it is important that once the attack is detected in one part the same automatically stopped from entering the miniOrange Network including our customer’s websites. Realtime Blocking will stop the attack from one website to be performed again on another website by taking advantage of other servers on the miniOrange network.

4. IP Reputation

   Your IP’s Reputation will always help you build or destroy our business. If your IP is flagged as malicious and blacklisted it will affect the SEO and traffic of your website. When an IP generates a lot of spam such as sending spam email other websites mark the IP as malicious leading to bad Reputation. A website can generate spam if it is hacked and used by attackers for some specific task. Using miniOrange keep a check on your website reputation with other websites.

5. Enhanced IP Whitelisting

   Many times we don’t need to monitor any request from our own trusted network. In this case, we whitelist the URL and let them bypass our WAF. There can be issues if anyone attacks from there own network. To protect this, every request is monitored to a certain level to verify the request does not affect the website.

6. Country Blocking

   Not every site have customers around the world. When your website is in small or medium stage business is from a set of countries. In this case, you can block the request coming from countries like Russia, Brazil, China and others.

7. IP Lookup

   When there are too many requests from one particular IP you might want to know more details about the origin of the request. With the IP Lookup feature you can know details about the request with Country, ISP, State and City of the IP and take action if needed.

8. Bot Detection

   While there are bots with good intention we cannot ignore the fact that there are also bots with malicious intent like attacking a site, Web Scraping, form spam can cause serious loss. With miniorange you can detect bots with malicious intent and stop them from access and affect your site.

9. Live Monitoring and Auditing

   Tracking activity all the requests realtime can help you check activities on your sites on important events. miniOrange also provides an analysis of all the requests so that it is easier for customers to know more about the traffic on the website and plan actions based on that.

miniOrange Solutions:

miniOrange WAF provides three types of solutions plugin, On-premise module and Cloud solution from which users can choose anyone which will suit best for their website.

miniOrange Website Security Plugin

It is simple and easy to set up a plugin to secure your website. You can directly install the plugin from the Wordpress marketplace and activate WAF. Any Request coming to WordPress is first captured by the miniOrange WAF and is analyzed and monitored before it can be executed.

With plugin the request is scanned on the server where the WordPress is installed. The miniOrange Firewall is initiated before Wordpress is initiated which means every request reaching the website will first be scanned by miniOrange Firewall and then passed to WordPress. So any genuine request is passed to the WordPress and a malicious request is stopped from moving forward. This WordPress is safe and secure.

Advantages:

1. Easy to use.
2. No setup required.
3. Cost-effective.

miniOrange Website Security On-premise Solution

When you use a Firewall plugin on WordPress the request reaches the server after which it is scanned and then the action is taken. While this is good for a new website or any website with low traffic but is never enough medium to large scale website with a lot of traffic.

In this solution, WAF and your website will be on two different servers. The frontend server will be your WAF will accept all the requests and pass the only genuine request to the backend server where your site is hosted. Here no one but only frontend servers are aware of the Backend server address. So any malicious request is stopped on frontend server and the attacker will never know about the backend server with the actual website.

Advantages:

1. Firewall handles only request to their server and not others.
2. Customizable based on the requirement.
3. Dedicated solution for the website.

miniOrange Website Security Cloud Solution

This solution works exactly as the On-Premise solution with the only difference being the frontend server which will be a miniOrange server where all the requests would arrive and miniOrange will forward the genuine request to the corresponding website server. You will configure your website where the request will be sent from miniOrange Cloud WAF. With multiple servers across the globe the request will pass from the nearest server making it fast and efficent.

Advantages:

1. Any malicious request blocked for one customer can be updated to customers across the cloud network.
2. Easy to set up and configure.
3. Protects the application server from outside attacks

Web Application Attack

Websites are one of the most used applications in the current world and at the same time preferable choice of the hacker for the attack. The websites contain a huge amount of sensitive data and this reason makes it favorable for the attacker to steal information.

It was developed by a team at Yale University, which was later a project maintained by JASIG, and after that was merged into Apereo Foundation which now owns and maintains CAS. Apereo Foundations provide a multitude of software that is focused for educational institutions, and CAS is one among the solutions they offer.

There are many types of attacks on websites. Some of them are:

1. Denial of service
2. SQL Injections
3. Cross-Site Scripting
4. XML External Entity
5. Cross-Site Request Forgery
6. Remote File Inclusion
7. Local File Inclusion

These are the topmost attacks that can make a huge impact on the website. These are used for different purposes. Read More.