Protecting Your Web Applications

Chapter 3. Threat Prevention Technology

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Benjamin Franklin must have had a premonition of today’s cybersecurity threat landscape about 280 years ago when he said that, because it’s still true: remediation is far costlier than prevention. For example, while SQL injections are totally preventable, they are quite costly to repair. If a single incident results in the release of 5,000 customer records at an estimated $148 per record, the cost is $740,000. Preventing the SQL injection vulnerability would have almost no cost because the remedy is simple: allow no user-generated input into forms. Working from the planning stage through to deployment to maintenance with security in mind provides the required ounce of prevention.

Not all security vulnerabilities are as simple to prevent as a SQL injection, but the cost of prevention is a tiny fraction of the cost of a single breach. Remember: There’s no direct correlation between threat severity and prevention expense. Each threat is different and must be approached individually.

Note

There is a rise in multivector attacks—those that combine multiple types of DDoS attacks into a single assault. From a mitigation or remediation perspective, you should separate and focus on each type of attack individually.

In this chapter, we explore the technologies that you should include in your protection strategy—bot management, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning—and we offer concrete ...