Defend Against Monster Web Attacks With Atomic WAF (Web Application Firewall) and Atomic ModSecurity Rules - Atomicorp - Unified Security Built on OSSEC

Monster of the Week; ModSecurity Rules and WAF to the Rescue

Thar be monsters.

Crimes are increasingly digital, with tens of thousands of websites getting hacked every day, on average. Malware can spread from there, infecting customers and members of the business supply chain. You know about the SolarWinds and Colonial Pipeline hacks, but there was another ransomware attack in early July that hit software provider Kaseya, exploiting a vulnerability in its own code, and affecting thousands of its small business customers. Lurking around the next corner is something terrifying that can obliterate your defenses (whether you’re large or small) and get at what is precious, including business partners and customers. There’s a recurring new threat at all times, the next scary thing, the boogeyman of the week. You can try to keep up on these latest threats through sources such as Krebs on Security, CISA, The CyberWire, The Hacker News, the Internet Storm Center, Threatpost, Dark Reading, ZDNet Zero Day, and many others. 

Although not always that creatively different from the last form of malware, each new monster (the variant) can manifest itself in a menagerie of forms, snowballing with combinations and methods during the attack cycle (and consist of hordes of all of the following):

• The wolf in sheep’s clothing. The virtual Trojan horse fooling your human decision makers and bypassing gate protocol.
• The siege! An increase in deceptive and predatory phishing by the imposturous entity, and the unleashing of lateral movement tactics meant to spread malware and malicious instructions to as many critical device endpoints and data servers as possible.
• An alien cyber parasite taking over hosts and spreading, leading to the zombification of your computing endpoints and administrative privileges.
• The kidnapping data monster, known broadly as Ransomware. It’s got your data, it has control, you’re hostage, and if you pay them they ‘might’ give your digital data back. The ensuing set of criminal demands… 
• Or the sneaky timebomb onslaught. The cyber enemy eludes detection, setting up zero day attacks where they all go off at once. A massive onslaught of enemy forces overrunning the defenses, shutting down systems, stealing or ransoming data, or taking over control of your machines. 

These attacks interrupt systems, putting some companies… and, in some cases, hospital patients tied to equipment… to death. Unfortunately, in most cases, there’s nothing left to do but try to recover some of your data, and work with investigatory authorities. 

There are those attacks that make headlines for a day or two, and usually recovery can take place, but the damages they trigger linger for months or longer and jeopardize customer confidence and healthy revenue generation. It’s the often unseen, underreported story. You need to be ready, because if caught off guard, the consequences can be terminal. Adding to this frightening mythos, tallies as high as 60 percent of small businesses going out of business within six months following a hack have been reported.

Wielding the WAF and a Zero Trust Philosophy

A Web application firewall (WAF) is a security technology that filters, inspects, and protects traffic between web entities and the internet. WAFs, aka firewall capabilities extended out to endpoints, provide a core part of a zero trust architecture against the latest monster threat and the environment it thrives on–i.e., the Web. WAFs provide deep inspection of traffic between your websites and the wild wild web. 

Free ModSecurity Rules deliver web application security rules, and are a great starter toolset against web attacks. Free ModSecurity Rules are a tempting way to stop some of these latest attacks for free, but they do not provide professional support, expert rule creation and enforcement, a graphical user interface, an integrated web application firewall (WAF), and, most important, the security coverage you need. 

A ModSecurity and WAF platform should be based on a zero trust approach to web traffic. Inherently trust nothing – not devices, not web servers, and not clouds. This comes in the form of several thousands of ModSecurity Rules: 

Atomic ModSecurity Rules enable you to:

• Protect your web sites and applications from zero day attacks
• Provide zero false positives
• Get 24/7 expert support
• Incorporate continuous threat intelligence to block attacks before they menace your systems 
• Protect your websites from malware; block malware uploads
• Detect and stop sensitive data from leaking from your systems
• Block web shells and other backdoors into your systems
• Protect yourself from Brute Force attacks
• Stop Denial of Service attacks
• Eliminate spam from your websites
• Protect your search engine page rank
• Regulate web traffic to keep your digital business thriving while staving off monster web attacks.

Why Atomic ModSecurity Rules over Free ModSecurity Rules?

Digital enterprises, and Web application hosting companies that are responsible for enterprise customers’ security, should consider ModSecurity Rules as a free or low-cost foundation for web application security. 

Atomicorp’s inexpensive Atomic Modsecurity Rules provide a commercial offering that provides key additional functionality and professional service that the free version does not. With the free offer you get only 100s of security rules, but commercial Atomic ModSecurity Rules and WAF come with thousands.

With Atomicorp ModSecurity Rules, you also get:

• 24/7 expert support
• ‘Within the hour’ response times 
• Daily rule updates
• Zero day protections
• Automation of upgrades and security rules enforcement. Updates are no longer missed. On the world wide web, we’re all connected, and monsters, predators, and parasites are out there trying to take control over your computing resources. Be protected against the next one.
• Layer 7 DoS protection… 
• Brute force attack defense…
• Real-time threat intelligence.

Atomic WAF (Web Application Firewall)

Evaluate Atomic WAF if you need a turnkey WAF solution with management console, GUI based rule editing, and out-of-the-box management and compliance reports. Starting at $300 per server, you get an easy to install, one step WAF combined with our powerful management and reporting GUI.* The Atomic WAF offering delivers:

• Management and compliance reports.
• Role-based access control GUI.
• Single sign-on (SSO) integration.
• Cloudflare integration, which filters site to site traffic against more of these monsters…

* Minimum of 5 licenses.

Atomicorp for ModSecurity Rules, WAF, and Zero Trust Endpoint Protection

We can take care of all the web-based threats for you via our ModSecurity Rules and ModSecurity WAF offerings.

With Atomicorp zero trust web application security, every endpoint (cloud-based Web servers, too) is protected by thousands of ModSecurity Rules in a zero trust architecture. There’s no more firewall perimeter; it is instead firewall and advanced security protection at every endpoint.

Digital business transformation, no problem. Atomic ModSecurity Rules and WAF platform keep your web assets safe and running.

Visit the Web application security page.

Read the ModSecurity Rules and WAF Solution Overview.

Contact us about Atomic ModSecurity Rules or Atomic WAF.