Importance of Web Application Firewall Technology for Protecting Web-Based Resources

Overview

Web-based applications and services have changed the landscape of information delivery and exchange in today's corporate, government, and educational arenas. Ease of access, increased availability of information, and the richness of web services have universally increased productivity and operational efficiencies. These increases have led to heavier reliance on web-based services and greater integration of internal information systems and data repositories with web-facing applications. While motivations of attackers against a victim's corporate and organizational assets remain the same (financial, IP, identity theft, services disruption, or denial of service, for example), web applications enable a whole new class of vulnerabilities and exploit techniques such as SQL injection, cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery, to name a few.