How To Detect Web Application Firewall

You need a web application firewall (WAF) to improve security for your site because it will mitigate many cyber threats and offer protection from many kinds of vulnerabilities. This is why more and more businesses have decided to implement a WAF. Implementing a WAF however is not the solution for all your security problems. You need to keep making changes to the application firewall so that it can keep detecting and blocking attacks.

Before you start it is better to be aware of where the WAF is located; usually the firewall is placed in between the server and client. But there are also WAFs which are deployed on web servers directly.

- One of the ways to detect a WAF is manual discovery. You can check the cookies as some WAFs are known to add their cookies during communications between the web server and client.
- You can also detect WAFs through headers because many WAF products let headers be rewritten. These firewalls even allow the hosting servers to generate different HTTP responses from commonly used ones.
- A WAF can also be detected when you are trying to send requests but the session expires very fast.
- Alternately, you can use automated discovery tools; these tools such as WAFW00F are typically simple to use and they can help you find out many types of WAF products. Another tool Nmap may also be useful for detecting a WAF as this contains a specific script which is equipped to detect.

These are some of the easily available tools for WAF detection. Such activities should ideally be performed during every penetration test in the course of the information gathering phase. These solutions will help to make sure that results are accurate. Moreover, the fact that there is a WAF working actively is beneficial because it lets the penetration tester experiment with various techniques for bypassing the protections. This will help to reveal the weaknesses still existing in the application.

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