Imagine this: it’s a perfectly normal Thursday morning. The coffee is hot, dashboards are green, and your application is quietly doing its job. No alerts. No calls. No one blaming the network. Everything is perfect and you even start planning your weekend.
Then it changes.
The application doesn’t crash; it slows. Graphs drift from green to yellow. Probably a traffic blip, you think, refreshing the dashboard. CPU climbs. Threads stack up.
Seconds later, tickets arrive: “The site is slow.”, “Checkout is stuck.”
Traffic has jumped from a few thousand requests per second to hundreds of thousands in under ten seconds. No launch. No campaign. Just the realization that your application is under attack.
Welcome to the world of Web DDoS.
What Is a Web DDoS Attack (and Why Should You Care)?
A Web DDoS attack targets the application layer. Think HTTP/S requests that look legitimate but are designed to overwhelm your application. Unlike traditional volumetric DDoS attacks that try to flood your pipes, Web DDoS attacks are sneakier. They speak the language of your application fluently and abuse it relentlessly. Traditional WAFs, which focus on known vulnerabilities and bad behavior patterns, often miss these attacks because the requests appear valid, they don’t break rules, they just use them at scale.
A Web DDoS attack might last seconds, hours, or days. During that time, applications slow down or collapse, users abandon sessions, SLAs are breached, and trust erodes. Short, aggressive bursts are often used as proof-of-capability. Warning shots meant to demonstrate how easily disruption can happen. Whether for extortion, competition, ideology, or ego, the motivation is the same: applications are valuable, and taking them down hurts.
Cloud-Grade Protection… Without Moving to the Cloud
Here’s the good news.
Radware Cloud Security Services already provide Web DDoS Protection for cloud-based applications. However, many organizations intentionally keep applications on-prem, whether in a data center or private cloud, for regulatory, operational, or business reasons.
Using tight integration between Alteon and Radware’s Cloud Web DDoS service, that same cloud-grade protection can now be extended to on-prem applications without forcing architectural compromises.
- Protection Without Architectural Changes Applications stay exactly where they are. Protection comes to them. No traffic re-routing, no scrubbing detours, and no redesign of the network reducing risk, complexity, and deployment time.
- Simple Integration, Immediate Value Alteon already sits in the traffic path as the on-prem ADC, making it the natural enforcement point for Web DDoS protection with minimal operational overhead.
- Cloud Intelligence, On-Prem Enforcement Detection and intelligence are handled in Radware’s cloud, while attack mitigation and traffic cleaning are enforced directly on Alteon. Malicious requests are filtered locally, close to the application, ensuring fast response times and uninterrupted service for legitimate users.
- Built for Regulated Environment There is no need to migrate applications to the cloud, and no SSL certificate sharing is required. Preserving customer confidentiality and compliance with regulatory requirements.
Behind the Scenes of Web DDoS Protection for On-Prem Apps
At the heart of the architecture is Alteon, the on-prem load balancer where your applications and servers are defined.
But Alteon doesn’t work alone.
As traffic flows, Alteon continuously feeds telemetry to Radware’s cloud-based Web DDoS detection engine—the heart of the solution. Trained on global traffic patterns and real-world attack data, the engine uses advanced behavioral analysis to rapidly identify abnormal activity and emerging Web DDoS attacks. These are patterns that are nearly impossible to detect locally and can be easily missed when attackers intentionally blend in with legitimate users.
Once an attack is confirmed, Alteon instantly retrieves a dynamic, cloud-generated mitigation signature tailored specifically to that threat. Enforcement happens immediately and precisely.
This real-time collaboration allows Alteon to surgically filter malicious traffic while maintaining uninterrupted flow of legitimate requests.
The result: applications remain secure, responsive, and resilient. Even against today’s most sophisticated Web DDoS attacks.
Final Thought
Web DDoS attacks aren’t going away. If anything, they’re becoming smarter and more targeted. Protecting applications today requires cloud intelligence but not necessarily cloud migration.
With Alteon and Radware Cloud Web DDoS Protection working together, organizations can finally bring cloud-grade Web DDoS defense to on-prem applications without disruption, without compromise, and without giving attackers the satisfaction of seeing that “site unavailable” page.
And yes, this time, you get to enjoy your coffee while it’s still warm.
If you would like more information about our industry-leading solution against the latest generation of disruptive web DDoS attack, reach out to Radware’s cybersecurity professionals here. We would love to hear from you.