4 Ways Radware Application Protection Helps Overcome Staff and Skills Shortages

Cybersecurity staff and skills shortages are a problem for organizations worldwide. The long-lasting impact of the coronavirus pandemic, together with expanding threat surfaces and the growing complexity of attacks, has made staff shortages an enduring reality in many organizations. This is particularly true for web application protection, which is increasingly becoming a dedicated discipline within cybersecurity.

Overcoming these gaps requires a combination of elements centered around consolidation, automation and expert-managed security services.

As a leader in web application protection, Radware offers a comprehensive set of measures to help organizations streamline and simplify their web application security. This reduces reliance on manual configurations and helps overcome the shortage of cybersecurity staff and skills.

Measure #1: Automation

As cyberattacks — and cyber attackers — become more sophisticated, it is increasingly more difficult to rely on any type of security measure that is dependent on manual configuration(s). In an attempt to test cyber defenses, attackers have learned to constantly shift their attack vectors. As a result, defenses based on manual configurations, rules or policies will be quickly exposed and unable to keep up with morphing attack characteristics.

Moreover, as applications constantly change and user behavior patterns shift over time, security rules and policies must constantly adapt in order to allow legitimate user traffic to pass through while blocking malicious requests.

Radware’s application protection tools provide a number of key automation features that improve security efficacy while reducing the risk of false positives:

• Automatic traffic learning: Radware’s application protection tools are based on a ‘positive’ security model, allowing only legitimate user requests while blocking traffic that falls outside legitimate user behavior. This approach is predicated on automated traffic learning capabilities, which learn the behavior of legitimate users and create a baseline of legitimate user behavior. Everything that falls outside these behavioral patterns gets blocked.
• Automatic policy optimization: After Radware generates security policies that are custom-tailored to these customer behavior patterns, it begins a process of continuous policy optimization using machine learning (ML) algorithms to review ongoing security logs and automatically suggest security policy refinements. This produces more accurate security protection and less work for security teams.
• Automated false positive correction: In an attempt to remove barriers that could block legitimate user activity, Radware’s WAF (web application firewall) engine automatically scans for potential false positives and alerts security administrators, so they can allow them when needed.

Measure #2: Comprehensive, Centralized Application Protection

Another key measure for narrowing staffing gaps is eliminating unnecessary friction in managing security tools. This is done by combining multiple, disparate tools into a single, best-of-suite, unified platform that covers all the required bases.

Radware’s cloud security platform provides a comprehensive, one-stop shop for web application protection that covers key attack vectors and threat surfaces. The platform includes, in addition to other features:

• A web application firewall (WAF) that protects against web attacks, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), server-side request forgery (SSRF), other OWASP Top 10 threats, and more.
• A bot manager that distinguishes between human and non-human web traffic, and differentiates between good bots (such as search engine crawlers) and bad bots (such as web scrapers, DDoS botnets, and more).
• API protection that includes built-in, fully automated API discovery that identifies any undocumented APIs or API calls, and enforces protection for organizations’ entire API portfolio.
• DDoS protection that provides behavioral-based protection against DDoS attacks at both the network layers (Layers 3 and 4) and the application layer (Layer 7).
• Client-side protection that protects client endpoints against supply-chain attacks, such as formjacking (Magecart) and DOM XSS attacks.

Radware’s platform also provides a centralized management console that includes unified dashboards and allows for seamless reporting and management for all the aforementioned capabilities, and more.

Measure #3: Frictionless Integration

In today’s modern environments, application protection is no longer a standalone discipline of its own; it is inherently intertwined with application development, deployment, delivery, DevOps, and even marketing and social media. This is why frictionless integration is so important to application security. Web application protection in the modern era cannot get in the way.

Radware has the unique ability to provide frictionless integration for customers with the Radware SecurePath architecture. Unlike traditional, inline application protection mechanisms, the Radware SecurePath architecture operates out-of-band, which provides seamless application protection without requiring changes to existing architectures or processes.

In addition, traditional application protection tools operate inline, either as an appliance (for local deployments) or via DNS redirection (for cloud-based deployments). While this approach allows for inspecting all traffic, it also creates interruptions to existing deployment methods and adds extra hops and latency in cloud deployments. This is particularly a problem with multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments. Although out-of-path deployment options already exist, they are usually limited to alerting-only tools.

The Radware SecurePath architecture provides full protection from the very first packet with an API-based, out-of-path approach. By integrating with the application server, when a request comes in an API call it is sent to the nearest Radware PoP (point of presence). The request details are included and, once it’s analyzed for suspicious activity and recognized as a malicious threat, it is blocked. This allows full protection without requiring any changes to the data path, adding extra traffic hops and latency, and even without requiring the application’s SSL/TLS certificate.

Measure #4: Managed Security Services

Finally, Radware helps organizations overcome cybersecurity staff shortages with its managed security services, which are spearheaded by its Emergency Response Team (ERT).

As application protection becomes more of a dedicated discipline, many organizations are short of qualified staff with the knowledge, skills and experience to identify and protect against web application attacks.

Radware’s cloud application protection services are, by default, a managed service supported by Radware’s SOC (security operations center) and its support staff. They are responsible for helping customers with onboarding, configuration, ongoing monitoring, 24/7 support and attack-time protection.

This approach helps organizations enjoy two key elements: the improvement in the quality of their web application protection programs with experienced AppSec experts who live application protection day in, day out, and the reduction of burdens placed on internal staff. This allows them to do what they were hired to do — focus on the organization’s core responsibilities.

For More Information

The shortage of cybersecurity professionals worldwide has left organizations large and small searching for answers to a conundrum that doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon. The threat surface expands at such an alarming rate, it’s likely that the supply will never keep up with the demand. And, yes, threat actors understand this all too well. It’s why turning to cybersecurity experts like those at Radware is the perfect next step to ensure your organization is protected against today’s threats and ready for those on the horizon. Reach out to them HERE. They would love to hear from you.