The OWASP Automated Threat Handbook offers important industry standards by which organizations should set their security controls to detect and mitigate threats occurring through malicious internet-based automation attacks. Such assaults, from spamming, credential stuffing, CAPTCHA defeat, fraudulent account creation, and Denial of Service (DoS), can cause monetary and brand damage to companies experiencing them. This is where technologies such as web application firewalls (WAFs) and bot mitigation technologies and services come into play.
WAFs typically use deep-packet inspection, deliver logging and reporting, block real-time traffic, offer alerting capabilities and auto-update features, and perform web caching, content filtering, and web-based access to reporting and logging. They also protect traffic from reaching the underlying operating system, and filter application traffic to only legitimate requests. Bot mitigation products have also proven increasingly useful to organizations trying to avoid falling victim to malicious web automation attacks. The products named for this category can offer these technologies in tandem or alone.
