Cybersecurity Glossary
Web Application Firewall
A filter in front of your website that blocks malicious requests before they reach it.
What Web Application Firewall means
A web application firewall inspects requests to your site and blocks patterns associated with attacks such as injection, scripting and automated login abuse. It can also apply rate limits and block traffic by country or reputation. Cloud services such as Cloudflare provide this without hardware.
Why Web Application Firewall matters for small businesses and nonprofits
For a WordPress site it buys time between a vulnerability being published and your plugin being updated, which is exactly the window in which mass exploitation occurs.
What to do about Web Application Firewall
- Put a filtering layer in front of any public website that accepts input
- Rate limit login and form pages to stop automated abuse
- Review blocked requests occasionally, because they show what is being tried
Not sure where you stand on this?
We review your current setup against the basics, tell you plainly what is covered and what is not, and give you a ranked list with effort and cost. No jargon and no scare tactics.