Cloudbric Corp. > Blog > Why Your Small Business Needs a Web Application Firewall

Why Your Small Business Needs a Web Application Firewall

2015-12-16 Blog

In the United States, small businesses account for 75% of registered businesses in the country. With over 28 million small businesses, Americans are becoming braver and many are launching businesses for themselves. These businesses are often independent—funding everything completely themselves. And as the world becomes more and more digitalized, within those 28 million businesses, 54% of them have created and manage their own websites.

As businesses continue to expand to online, business owners need to focus on aspects of their businesses that their counterparts ten years ago never had to consider—social media advertising, SEO, reviews, and website design and maintenance—just to name a few. With so many online activities that small businesses need to focus on, it can be difficult to build or even think of creating a security plan that protects that website that supports your online business.

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Your website is critical to your business’s success. But are you protecting it?

Corporate businesses, especially tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon create large web security plans with multiple teams of developers and testers that search their websites for vulnerabilities—one example being Microsoft’s new  Cyber Defense Operations Center as well as extremely sophisticated However, most small businesses cannot afford a fully-staffed team of developers and testers—let alone a huge cybersecurity focused defense center.

Small Businesses Need Website Security

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Often times, we think, “If something does not seem broken—it probably isn’t.” However, that is not the case. According to Whitehat Security’s 2015 Report, 86% of all existing websites have at least one vulnerability. A website does not have to be down to have a vulnerability. Through a vulnerability, a hacker can steal private information, program backdoors, plant phishing pages, or use your site as a bot in a DDoS attack and you may never know because your CMS service (i.e- WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc) cannot detect it and those attacks are actually designed to go undetected. It is through these means that the average cost of a hack attack for American small businesses was $20,752 in 2014.

What is a Web Application Firewall?

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With all of these dangers on the internet, a web application firewall (WAF) is the major line of defense for websites between hackers. OWASP, The Open Web Application Security Project, a leading authority in web development, names WAF services as a best practice to protect your website or web app from attacks. A WAF acts as a proxy and monitors the traffic coming in and out of your website to ensure that hackers cannot access your website and its contents. In addition, a WAF protects your website’s vulnerabilities that your developers did not notice or fix—giving your website twenty-four hour security.

Cloudbric is a logic-based web application firewall solution that is able to detect the most elusive hack attacks. Normal WAF services use signature-based pattern-matching recognition software to determine if incoming or outgoing traffic have good intentions. This means that their recognition software only recognizes currently known hack attacks. However, that method is not highly accurate because hackers constantly change their method of attack. Unlike our competitors, Cloudbric uses WAPPLES, a Logic Analysis Engine that recognizes the characteristics of hackers and applies those learnings to recognize the characteristics of attacks versus real website visitors.

In a time where one million malware attacks are released every day, enterprises all over the world are investing millions of dollars in cyber security. Although we often hear about large companies being targeted by hackers, small businesses are not exempted of these attack threats. Most hackers target SMBs and will most likely continue to target them for their lack of security. In response, SMB owners need to take control of their websites and increase their security. Small businesses do not need to invest the millions of dollars needed to protect their websites from hack attacks. They too can have enterprise-level security by using a strong logic-based web application firewall that blocks hackers’ attempts by blocking their malicious incoming and outgoing traffic.

If you would like to learn more about Cloudbric’s logic-based WAF service, please contact us at support@cloudbric.com.

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