Cyber attacks increased 22% over Black Friday weekend in 2016. Phishing links are also expected to go up as much as 336% around Thanksgiving, making consumers more vulnerable to malware and the theft of financial information. With attacks increasing, and getting more sophisticated, experts see this trend continuing as we get closer to the big holiday shopping season this year.
For e-commerce site owners, these threats and attacks can take many forms. Threats at the web application layer of your storefront, for example, can have catastrophic consequences, like the theft of sensitive information (credit card data), or attacks that render a web application unavailable for users. You could even experience an attack from a competitor scraping your site for product information or pricing.
So how does an online store owner prepare for this, when everything about the attack is unknown – timing, origin, type of attack, and so on?
The answer is the web application firewall, or WAF.
They come in many forms, but Webscale offers a true SaaS-based Cloud WAF as part of its CloudEDGE Security offering – simple to deploy, easy to manage via an intuitive customer portal, and offering significant ROI benefits over hardware and software-based deployments.
Many vendors will claim to be SaaS or Software-as-a-Service, simply because they offer a monthly contract, but that’s not it at all. The Webscale Cloud WAF is always future-proofed with new security rules and software updates automatically applied across our entire customer base instantly. That means that if your storefront is affected by a zero day vulnerability, you don’t need to wait for the platform provider to patch it, we’ll automatically write security rules to instantly protect your applications, regardless of its nature, ensuring you’re protected all the time.
And there’s a great deal more, one-click DDoS protection with Shield Mode, superior block/allow lists capabilities to block (or allow) requests and sessions by IP address, user agent or the user’s origin country, as well as application awareness. The Webscale Cloud WAF is the only security solution designed with specific optimizations for e-commerce and enterprise applications. We do this because each application may have different security needs and the ability to apply custom security policies is critical for application owners and IT.
I could go on, but you can visit our Security and Compliance use case if you’d like to learn more. Instead I’ll leave you with a few highlights of 2016 Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend:
- Delivered 100% uptime across all 571 storefronts managed by the Webscale platform
- Blocked 33 million requests to one customer’s site, and kept them live, after a hacker attempted to hold their site to ransom for $200K
- Cut more than $1,000,000 from our customers’ cloud bills by assigning resources only where needed
- Saved thousands of dollars in human capital through automation, leaving our customers to focus on their business
If you’d like to chat to one of our technical account specialists about your security needs, reach out today at info@webscalenetworks.com
