A web application firewall

Most organizations have to leave port 80 or 443 open so that users can connect to the website. This means that both genuine users, as well as attackers, can connect to the web application that is running on the servers.

Since most applications, in turn, run on servers and connect to the database, vulnerabilities in the application can lead to an attacker gaining partial control of the server, as well as reading the credentials or sensitive data stored in the database.

This is one of the reasons why the necessity to protect web applications has risen and one of the solutions other than secure coding is Web Application Firewall (WAF).

WAF is optimized for protecting web applications against various types of attacks. WAF is a must-have tool in today's environment.

They are exclusively designed to understand the web application logic that includes HTTP GET, POST, HEAD, and so on but also SQL, cookies, XML, XSS, and so on.

No application is 100% secure; even big organizations with dedicated security teams such as LinkedIn, Sony, and many more were compromised because of web application-based attacks.

Although IPS can read the TCP data header, it is not optimized for a web application.

In the use case of a startup getting hacked, the reason it was hacked was that there were multiple web application vulnerabilities that included SQL injection. This could have been prevented if there was a properly configured WAF in the environment.