What's new in Cloud Application Protection 2.0

In November 2019, Barracuda launched our application security platform, Cloud Application Protection. Cloud Application Protection is a platform to protect web and API applications wherever they reside — in the cloud, on premises, or hybrid. We built the platform to provide comprehensive web application and API protection (WAAP) and centered it around Barracuda Web Application Firewall and Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service. The platform added vulnerability management, advanced bot protection, DDoS protection, API protection, advanced threat protection, and identity and access control to provide comprehensive security against application threats.

Over the course of the past 18 months, the security landscape has changed significantly. Digital transformation has moved faster than anyone ever imagined due to extended “Everything-From-Home” activities, and as expected, attackers have kept pace with the transformation. Bots are more rampant than ever and are impacting people’s daily lives — including vaccine appointments where the bot operators lock up slots before genuine users can. APIs are much more prevalent, and so are API attacks. There is an API attack in the news almost every single day, and the impacts are far reaching. We also see newer threats like supply chain attacks emerging in the form of attacks like Magecart and similar digital skimming attacks.

Today, we are announcing our upgrade to the platform, adding advanced defenses against these threat vectors — Cloud Application Protection 2.0.

Powerful new protections

Cloud Application Protection 2.0 builds on the original Cloud Application Protection platform and provides customers with powerful web application and API protection that is easy to use and protects any application environment.

 

Web application firewalls are fundamental to protecting applications. Barracuda WAF can be deployed as software-as-a-service, cloud-hosted, on-premises appliance, or in a container. The new containerized WAF can be deployed with application clusters to provide protection for both North-South and East-West traffic, adding close-in security to containerized applications. All deployment options provide comprehensive application security, including protection for the OWASP Top 10 and many more vulnerabilities and automated threats.

Active Threat Intelligence is our cloud-based layer that contains the Barracuda Vulnerability Manager, Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection, and the machine learning layer for Advanced Bot Protection. The new threat intelligence layer crowd-sources traffic data from honeypots and deployments and uses machine learning to process and push out threat intelligence to connected units. This threat intelligence is used by connected Barracuda WAFs to identify and block new attacks in near real time, providing faster security against evolving threats.

The Active Threat Intelligence layer also powers our new Auto-Configuration Engine. The Auto-Configuration Engine uses machine learning models to check an organization’s real-time traffic patterns and provide recommendations to tighten security settings, reducing administrative overhead. As newer machine learning models are built out, newer recommendations will automatically be created on connected units, providing administrators better visibility into their configurations, which allows them to quickly remediate any issues that are discovered.

Protecting against the latest application security threats

Today’s sophisticated bots can mimic human app users to carry out devastating attacks. Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection (ABP) uses artificial intelligence and machine learning in the cloud to continually improve its ability to spot and block bad bots and human-mimicking “low and slow” bots, while allowing legitimate human and bot traffic to proceed. The Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence layer also contains Barracuda ABP’s cloud dashboard, providing deep visibility into bots and their traffic patterns

Distributed Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks continue to be a serious threat. Barracuda application security solutions include powerful, full-spectrum DDoS protection. Covering Layer-3 to Layer-7 traffic and blocking both volumetric and application-based DDoS attacks, this capability ensures that your business-critical applications remain available, accessible, and effective.

Newer client-side skimming attack such as Magecart are difficult to detect and protect against. These attacks happen at the browser when it loads hacked versions of third-party scripts used by your website. Barracuda’s Client-Side Protection adds protections against these types of attacks with policy enforcement of Content-Security Policies and Sub-Resource Integrity. In addition, the Active Threat Intelligence dashboard also adds reporting capabilities for the configured policies and any violations, providing admins with a drilldown view of the issues in their websites.

Barracuda application security solutions provide protection for your entire attack surface, including REST and mobile applications, to help ensure that APIs are protected against the OWASP Top 10 for APIs and more. XML protection secures REST and WSDL interfaces against schema and WSDL poisoning. JSON protection scans payloads to ensure that only legitimate requests are allowed through. Integration with OpenID Connect and JWT adds authentication capabilities to APIs.

In addition to defending against a variety of cyber threats, it is also critical to ensure that only authorized personnel can access your application backends and data. Barracuda application security keeps data from falling into the wrong hands by integrating with AD, LDAP, and RADIUS, giving you granular control over which users and groups can access what data. Barracuda WAF solutions can secure all the services that rely on ADFS. SAML support provides a seamless single-sign-on (SSO) experience across on-premises and cloud applications. Two-factor authentication further enhances security and integrates with popular services such as RSA SecureID, SMS PASSCODE, Duo, and others.

We also recently surveyed 750 of IT security decision makers from organizations around the world. This survey, run by independent market research company Vanson Bourne, targeted a variety of organizations across the United States, EMEA and APAC to identify the top application security threats facing them today, their current defenses, and plans to improve their protections in the coming year. The report provides deep insight into these topics and is now available for download here.

Protect your apps with one simple platform.