DDoS Protection
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection mitigates volumetric, protocol, and application-layer attacks that aim to exhaust server resources and deny service to legitimate users. It operates at the network edge, absorbing malicious traffic before it reaches the origin infrastructure.
DDoS attacks don't need to be sophisticated to be devastating. A sustained volumetric attack can take down your entire online presence. Application-layer attacks are even worse — they look like legitimate traffic and bypass network-level defenses.
Network-layer protection (L3/L4) absorbs volumetric floods — SYN floods, UDP amplification, DNS reflection — by scrubbing traffic through globally distributed Points of Presence (PoPs) with terabit-scale capacity.
Application-layer protection (L7) distinguishes between legitimate users and attack bots using behavioral fingerprinting, JavaScript challenges, CAPTCHA escalation, and machine learning models trained on traffic patterns.
Always-on vs. on-demand deployment — always-on routes all traffic through the scrubbing network permanently; on-demand activates only during detected attacks via BGP route changes.
On-demand activation delay — by the time BGP propagation completes and scrubbing starts, the attack has already caused minutes of downtime.
Origin IP exposure — if attackers discover your origin server IP (through DNS history, email headers, or subdomain scanning), they can bypass the DDoS provider entirely.
Application-layer attacks under the threshold — slow-rate attacks (Slowloris, R.U.D.Y.) consume connections without triggering volumetric detection.
No plan for ransom DDoS — attackers threaten an attack and demand payment; without a tested runbook, organizations panic and pay.
Is your DDoS protection always-on or on-demand? What's your activation time during an attack?
Have you verified that your origin IP is not publicly discoverable through DNS history or email headers?
What happens to your application when an attacker sends 50 requests per second that each take 30 seconds to process?
When was your last DDoS simulation? Do you have a tested runbook that your ops team has actually practiced?
DNS Protection
DNS Protection secures the Domain Name System — the internet's phonebook — against hijacking, cache poisoning, and DDoS attacks targeting nameservers. It ensures domain resolution remains available and tamper-proof.
DNS is the phonebook of the internet — every connection starts with a DNS lookup. If an attacker compromises your DNS, they control where your users go. DNS hijacking, cache poisoning, and DDoS against DNS infrastructure can make your entire organization disappear from the internet.
Authoritative DNS protection ensures your domain's DNS records are served from a resilient, globally distributed infrastructure with built-in DDoS absorption — attackers can't take down what they can't overwhelm.
DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions) adds cryptographic signatures to DNS responses, preventing cache poisoning and man-in-the-middle attacks that redirect users to malicious servers.
DNS traffic analysis detects data exfiltration over DNS tunneling, domain generation algorithm (DGA) activity, and communication with known command-and-control servers.
Single-provider dependency — if your DNS provider goes down (and it has happened to major providers), every service behind it becomes unreachable.
DNSSEC misconfiguration — broken signature chains cause legitimate DNS responses to be rejected, creating self-inflicted outages.
No monitoring for DNS tunneling — attackers exfiltrate data through DNS queries in plain sight because nobody inspects DNS traffic.
Slow TTL management — during incidents, high TTL values mean DNS changes take hours to propagate, extending downtime.
Do you have redundant DNS providers, or does your entire online presence depend on a single DNS service?
Is DNSSEC enabled and properly validated across all your domains?
Can you detect DNS tunneling or data exfiltration over DNS queries in your environment?
What's your DNS TTL strategy — can you rapidly redirect traffic during an incident?
Content Delivery Network
A Content Delivery Network distributes cached content across global edge servers, reducing latency and offloading origin traffic. Beyond performance, CDN edge nodes serve as the first security checkpoint for incoming requests.
Performance is security. Slow applications frustrate users, increase abandonment, and create windows for attack. Without a CDN, every request hits your origin server — creating a single point of failure and a bottleneck that attackers can exploit.
CDNs cache static and dynamic content at edge Points of Presence (PoPs) worldwide. Users are served from the nearest PoP, reducing latency from hundreds of milliseconds to single digits.
Origin shielding protects your backend by absorbing traffic spikes — the CDN serves cached content even when your origin is under load or under attack.
Modern CDNs integrate WAF, bot management, and DDoS protection at the edge — security decisions happen before malicious traffic reaches your infrastructure.
Cache poisoning — if an attacker can inject malicious content into the CDN cache, it gets served to all users from all PoPs until the cache expires.
Origin bypass — if the origin server IP is exposed, attackers can hit it directly, bypassing all CDN-layer protections.
SSL/TLS misconfiguration — improper certificate management at the edge creates man-in-the-middle opportunities.
Over-caching sensitive content — API responses with user-specific data get cached and served to wrong users.
Can your CDN absorb a sudden 10x traffic spike without degrading performance or exposing your origin?
How do you prevent cache poisoning across your CDN edge nodes?
Is your origin server IP hidden from public discovery?
Do you have cache rules that prevent sensitive or personalized content from being cached at the edge?
Cloud WAF
A Cloud Web Application Firewall inspects HTTP/S traffic in real-time, blocking injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and protocol violations before they reach the application. It operates as a reverse proxy at the network edge with continuously updated rule sets.
Web applications are the #1 attack surface. Every exposed endpoint is an invitation — SQL injection, XSS, path traversal, command injection. Traditional network firewalls are blind to application-layer threats.
Cloud WAF sits as a reverse proxy in front of web applications, inspecting every HTTP/HTTPS request and response at the edge — before traffic reaches your infrastructure.
Uses signature-based detection (known attack patterns), behavioral analysis (anomaly scoring), and machine learning to classify traffic as legitimate or malicious.
Operates in blocking mode (active protection) or monitoring mode (detection only). Advanced Cloud WAFs add bot management, API protection, virtual patching, and automatic policy updates.
Over-reliance on default rulesets — attackers use encoding tricks, case variation, and protocol-level evasion to bypass signatures.
False positive fatigue — teams switch to monitoring mode and never go back to blocking.
No tuning after deployment — the WAF sees everything as equal priority, floods the SOC with noise.
Ignoring API traffic — traditional WAFs protect HTML forms but miss JSON/GraphQL payloads entirely.
What percentage of your WAF rules are in blocking mode vs. monitoring?
When was the last time you tested your WAF with real evasion techniques, not just textbook payloads?
Can your WAF distinguish between a legitimate API call and a crafted injection embedded in a JSON body?
How do you handle false positives today — do you have a tuning workflow or do you just whitelist?
API Security
API Security protects machine-to-machine communication channels — REST, GraphQL, gRPC — from abuse, data leakage, and business logic attacks. It enforces schema validation, rate limiting, and authentication at the API gateway layer.
APIs now carry more traffic than web pages. They expose business logic directly — authentication flows, data queries, transaction endpoints. And unlike web UIs, APIs have no natural rate limiting, no CAPTCHA, no human friction.
API security starts with discovery — you can't protect what you don't know exists. Shadow APIs, deprecated endpoints, and undocumented routes are the real risk.
Runtime protection inspects API calls against schema validation (OpenAPI/Swagger), checks authentication tokens, enforces rate limits, and detects business logic abuse.
Advanced platforms add API posture management — continuous inventory, risk scoring, and compliance mapping across your entire API estate.
No API inventory — teams don't know half their APIs exist, especially internal or partner-facing ones.
Authentication without authorization — the API checks who you are but not what you're allowed to access (BOLA/IDOR vulnerabilities).
Treating API security as a WAF problem — WAF rules designed for HTML don't understand JSON schema, GraphQL queries, or gRPC payloads.
No rate limiting on sensitive endpoints — password reset, OTP validation, and data export APIs are wide open to brute force.
How many APIs does your organization expose? How many of those are documented?
Do you enforce object-level authorization on every API endpoint, or only on user-facing ones?
Can you detect and block a credential stuffing attack that targets your login API at 10 requests per second?
What happens when a developer deploys a new API endpoint — does your security posture update automatically?
Advanced Bot Protection
Advanced Bot Protection distinguishes legitimate automation (search crawlers, monitoring) from malicious bots (credential stuffing, scraping, inventory hoarding). It uses behavioral analysis, device fingerprinting, and challenge mechanisms.
Bots account for nearly half of all internet traffic. Malicious bots scrape pricing, stuff credentials, hoard inventory, manipulate reviews, and abuse APIs at scale. They look increasingly human, defeating simple CAPTCHA and rate-limiting defenses.
Device fingerprinting collects hundreds of browser and device signals — screen resolution, installed fonts, WebGL rendering, mouse movements, keystroke dynamics — to distinguish humans from automated scripts.
Behavioral analysis tracks user journey patterns. Bots navigate directly to targets; humans browse, scroll, and hesitate. Machine learning models score each session's "humanness" in real-time.
Challenge escalation starts invisible (JavaScript challenges, proof-of-work) and escalates to visible challenges (CAPTCHA) only when suspicion is high — maintaining user experience while blocking automation.
Headless browser evolution — modern bots using Playwright/Puppeteer with stealth plugins pass basic JavaScript challenges and fingerprinting.
CAPTCHA fatigue — legitimate users abandon transactions when challenged too aggressively, hurting conversion rates.
API blind spots — bot protection on web pages but not on mobile app APIs or partner integrations.
Residential proxy networks — bots route through real residential IPs, making IP-based reputation scoring unreliable.
What percentage of your web traffic is automated? Do you even know?
Can your bot protection distinguish between a headless Chrome bot and a real Chrome user?
Are your mobile app APIs protected against credential stuffing with the same rigor as your web login?
How do you handle false positives — legitimate users blocked by aggressive bot rules?
On-Premises WAF
An On-Premises WAF Gateway is deployed within the data center network path, providing deep packet inspection and custom rule enforcement for applications that cannot be routed through cloud proxies due to compliance, latency, or data sovereignty requirements.
Not everything lives in the cloud. Legacy applications, internal portals, ERP systems, and regulated workloads often run on-premises. These applications need the same level of WAF protection as cloud-hosted ones, but with full data sovereignty and inline deployment.
On-premises WAF deploys as a physical or virtual appliance within your data center — inline (bridge/reverse proxy) or out-of-band (monitoring mode via TAP/SPAN port).
Full traffic inspection happens locally — no data leaves your network. This is critical for regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) with strict data residency requirements.
Advanced on-prem WAFs support hybrid deployment — unified policy management across on-prem appliances and cloud WAF instances from a single console.
Capacity planning failures — on-prem WAF has fixed throughput. Traffic spikes beyond capacity cause either dropped connections or bypass mode.
Patch and update lag — cloud WAFs get automatic rule updates; on-prem appliances depend on manual updates that teams delay or skip.
Single point of failure — without proper HA (high availability) configuration, a WAF appliance failure takes down the applications behind it.
Visibility gaps — on-prem WAF only sees traffic routed through it; direct connections, VPN tunnels, and internal lateral movement are invisible.
Is your on-prem WAF deployed inline or in monitoring mode? If monitoring, why hasn't it moved to blocking?
When was your last WAF appliance firmware and ruleset update?
What happens if your WAF appliance fails — does traffic bypass or drop?
Do you have unified visibility across on-prem and cloud WAF deployments, or are they managed separately?
Client-Side Protection
Client-Side Protection guards against supply-chain attacks that inject malicious JavaScript into the user's browser — Magecart-style skimming, formjacking, and third-party script compromise. It monitors and controls client-side resource loading.
Modern websites load dozens of third-party scripts — analytics, ads, chat widgets, payment processors. Each one is a supply chain risk. A compromised third-party script can steal credit card numbers, session tokens, and PII directly from the user's browser — and your server-side security never sees it.
Client-side protection monitors all JavaScript execution in the user's browser — tracking which scripts are loaded, what DOM elements they access, and what data they attempt to exfiltrate.
Content Security Policy (CSP) enforcement restricts which domains can serve scripts, styles, and other resources — preventing unauthorized script injection.
Real-time behavioral analysis detects Magecart-style attacks: scripts that suddenly start reading credit card form fields, capturing keystrokes, or sending data to unknown domains.
Overly permissive CSP — teams add "unsafe-inline" and wildcard domains to avoid breaking functionality, rendering CSP useless.
Third-party script trust — "we use Google Analytics so it's safe" ignores that the script could be compromised at the source or via a supply chain attack.
No visibility into shadow scripts — marketing teams add tracking pixels and chat widgets without security review.
Compliance blind spots — PCI DSS 4.0 now requires client-side script monitoring, but most organizations don't have it.
How many third-party scripts run on your payment and login pages? Do you have a complete inventory?
Can you detect if a third-party script suddenly starts reading credit card form fields?
Is your Content Security Policy actively enforced, or just in report-only mode?
Are you prepared for PCI DSS 4.0 requirements around client-side script monitoring?