Security is critical for application delivery

Keep an application protected anywhere, anytime with Musato Technologies

Digital transformation is increasing an organization’s dependency on applications. As a result, there is an increase in cyberattacks on applications that can result in data loss, performance, and availability issues. The ability to combine application protection with application delivery is critical.

The complexity of attacks and the speed at which new mitigation tools and techniques are being bypassed require a more robust and comprehensive solution that provides faster protection and reduced maintenance costs. Trends such as DevOps and cloud migration are forcing application security teams to investigate new ways to manage policies and automate deployment across multiple private and public cloud environments.

Musato technologies is one of the leading ICT companies based in Africa that provides application delivery solutions that integrate web application firewall (WAF), bot management, and automation capabilities to ensure applications stay secure.

Its automation wizards and analytics help minimize the need for experts to deploy, maintain and optimize application protection services in your private data center and public clouds.

The applications threat landscape

The top issues challenging application security are defined by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 list. Organizations that seek effective application protection use the OWASP Top 10 as a starting point for ensuring protection from the most common and virulent threats or application misconfigurations that can lead to vulnerabilities.

In addition to the OWASP Top 10, other threat classifications broaden the list to nearly 100 attack categories that can threaten web applications:

Injection
Broken authentication
Sensitive Data Exposure
XML External Entities (XXE)
Broken Access Control
Security Misconfiguration
Cross-site Scripting (XSS)
Insecure Deserialization
Using Components with known vulnerabilities
Insufficient Logging and Monitoring

Some of the attacks may originate by automated scripts and bots. Over half of all internet traffic is generated by bots — some legitimate, some malicious. Competitors and adversaries alike often deploy “bad” bots that leverage different methods to achieve nefarious objectives.

This includes account takeover, scraping data, denying available inventory, and launching denial-of-service (DoS) attacks with the intent of stealing data or causing service disruptions. Sophisticated largescale attacks often go undetected by conventional mitigation systems and strategies. These attack vectors may result in service disruption, data theft, account takeover, or involve HTTP protocol manipulation leading to HTTP Request Splitting and HTTP Response Splitting attacks. They can also include various traffic processing weaknesses that may result in a denial of service, and other application-based attacks such as Buffer Overflow, Directory Traversal, OS Commanding, and Path traversal.

The Challenge Of False Positives

Web applications are being accessed both by desired legitimate users and undesired attackers (malignant users whose goal is to harm the application). One of the biggest challenges in protecting web applications is the ability to accurately differentiate between the two and identify and block security threats while not disturbing legitimate traffic.

A false negative is caused when an attack is not detected or blocked by the WAF. False positives are the opposite problem, i.e., heightened security policies that cannot effectively differentiate legitimate users from attacks and as a result block traffic from legitimate users. Typically, organizations are more sensitive to false positives and will lower their security posture to not block legitimate traffic, at the risk of introducing false negatives.

No expertise required

Musato Technologies offers various deployment options so organizations can add application delivery and protection services in any environment, either physical, virtual, or cloud-based data centers. It offers automation APIs for complete lifecycle automation of application protection services to simplify their deployment, provisioning, and maintenance so experts aren’t required.

Actionable Reporting

Musato Technologies provides a monitoring and reporting tool which makes it easy to monitor application protection events, cyberattacks, and blocked transactions. With its intuitive grouping and filtering capabilities, even untrained security experts can easily identify attacks as well as false-positive events blocked by the WAF.

Refining a security policy to eliminate false positives doesn’t require a security expert and is as easy as pressing a button and adding a specific event type to the WAF’s “Allow List.”

Applications protection that scales

Keeping applications secure is a resource-intensive function. Allocating resources to match peak application usage periods can be costly when operating in a cloud environment. Musato Technologies’ solution detects application usage and automatically allocates additional resources to keep it secure without impacting availability or performance.

This ensures that all application protection modules will not become a network bottleneck, even during peak operating periods. As operating loads reduce below predefined levels, our solution automatically reduces the number of instances and resources. The result is a continually optimized utilization of application delivery and protection resources that match application usage patterns. Contact Musato Technologies today to learn more about our ICT solutions that can assist your business growth and productivity.