We have websites that clients access from the internet, so we use it to protect these websites and to load balance between the backend servers.
We have FortiGate firewalls with IPS sensors and so on.
The WAF profiles has been most effective at mitigating web-based threats – probably something standardized, but again, we haven't tested it on heavily used websites. The websites that we use it for so far are just average websites. It can likely protect from some requests like bots and stuff like that.
The AI/ML-based detection in FortiWeb has enhanced our web security posture to some extent. It's good with general stuff. Again, it's not specialized. So, standard WAF threats, like bots, it can detect those faster. It's good for the average website, average requests, and the average security setup. But we have other malicious requests that are probably outside the typical OWASP threats – they're specialized for our organization.
For example, if you have the FIX protocol, the financial protocol... if attackers can get into it with a targeted client ID... these threats aren't in the standard OWASP list because they're not general attacks that everybody faces. They're very specific. Now, many companies use the FIX protocol on private circuits, so they're protected outside of breach attempts. But, believe it or not, we have FIX open on the public internet for some websites, and those need protection. They need something outside the WAF that FortiWeb doesn't have. You can try to apply the WAF, and it might catch a threat if it originated from a bot. But if somebody is malicious enough to go under the bot detection radar, they could still process it.
So, for known threats, like bots, the detection is good. For APIs, it's also good because it can detect anomalies with standard API attacks. Again, these are mostly average, non-targeted attacks.
If an attacker specifically targets your organization, understands your protocols and business model... the standard protection is good because it detects things that aren't coming from a browser – it recognizes that it's not normal user activity or anomalies on your website. That's beneficial.
Most bot-generated attacks don't come from a browser. I did notice that it can detect when the request is not coming from a browser – it recognizes that it's not normal user activity on your website. It can detect anomalies publicly, which is good.
So, what would be good is this: put FortiWeb in front as the first line of defense. It can take care of a lot of the average user traffic and filter it out. You can keep that for your average applications, but when you have specialized applications behind that, then we need specialized protection for those applications – whether it's F5 or something else.
The deployment for easy