Barracuda launches new capabilities for Web Application and API Protection (WAAP)

Barracuda Networks announced the expansion of Barracuda Cloud Application Protection, its platform for Web Application and API Protection (WAAP). This new release adds powerful new automated API Discovery and GraphQL security capabilities, augments Account Takeover Protection capabilities, and enhances the client-side protection feature set. Additionally, the integration of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall and the Venafi Trust Protection Platform adds the ability to continually automate machine identity management for TLS certificates to stop outages and make it easy to scale web application firewall usage.

According to Gartner, “Web applications, mobile applications and APIs are subject to increasing volumes of complex attacks. Security and risk management technical professionals responsible for application security architecture must use an appropriate mix of mitigating technologies to secure applications.”

With the launch of new capabilities of WAAP, Barracuda Cloud Application Protection now includes continuous, automatic API Discovery using Machine Learning to improve compliance and security. This will greatly reduce the admin overheads of importing API specs and configuring protections, while allowing development teams to build and deploy secure APIs quickly.

Tim Jefferson, SVP, Engineering for Data, Network, and Application Security at Barracuda highlighted that “the all-new Barracuda Cloud Application Protection adds powerful new API security, account takeover protection capabilities, and client-side protection for our customers, driven by machine learning and other advanced technologies. Every business needs this type of critical protection against API vulnerabilities and automated bot attacks.”

Additional highlights of the new WAAP release include:

• New GraphQL security capabilities that include native parsing of such requests and enforcement of security checks to protect against GraphQL specific attacks.

• New Privileged Account Protection (PAP), backed by a Machine Learning layer, identifies risky logins and performs preconfigured actions to prevent Account Takeover attacks.

• Enhanced Machine Learning models in the Active Threat Intelligence (ATI) layer that powers Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection to identify and detect persistent bots. In addition, the configuration feedback loop from ATI has been improved, allowing admins to perform configuration actions from the cloud dashboard.

• Improved controls for client-side protection over the configuration and visualization of Content-Security Policies and Sub-Resource Integrity settings. Client-side protection capabilities in Barracuda Cloud Application Protection closely track the protective requirements that are being set to block attacks like Magecart and other website supply chain attacks.

• New capabilities for Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service make administration actions easier. The new snapshots feature allows the import and export of configuration as a JSON file to enable easier integration with automation tools. In addition, admins can perform comparisons between snapshots and setup automatic snapshots for easier configuration management. The improved CDN UI provides new control and visualization capabilities to customers using the CDN services.

The new technology integration of Barracuda Web Application Firewall and Venafi Trust Protection Platform offers a fully featured, unified solution that enables the secure, centralized, and automated management of certificates and keys across Barracuda Web Application Firewall. This integration adds security to the managed machine identities, and eliminates the anxiety and risk associated with certificate-related downtime and risks.

“Before Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service, it’s almost like we were blind. We had no visibility into just how frequently we were being probed and attacked. Now going through the logs, our eyes have been opened, and it seems a wonder that we never suffered a serious breach in the past,” said Kieron Prince, Cloud and Infrastructure Lead at L&Q.

“Barracuda has earned a reputation for providing powerful, easy-to-use protection for web applications and APIs. These new enhancements provide our mutual customers with a higher level of protection against API, bot, and client-side attacks,” said Dave Sasson, Chief Strategy Officer at Hanu, an award-winning Microsoft Cloud services provider and Azure Expert MSP.