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Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Score8.6 out of 10

15 Reviews and Ratings

What is Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)?

The Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF) is based on technology acquired with Incapsula and the former WebSphere WAF.

Categories & Use Cases

Who Buys & Uses Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF) Reviews

What users are saying about Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF).
View all Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews

So much more than just a regular WAF

Incentivized
Marcus Cozendey
Network Security Engineer in Information Technology at Serasa Experian (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Imperva Cloud WAF and Secure Sphere WAF on the On premise environment. Currently we manage over 4k websites worldwide, mostly onboarded on the Cloud WAF. The main features we use is the standard WAF Signature Rules, DDoS Protection, Bot Protection, Imperva managed certificates, Cache and custom rules to manipulate traffic. The Custom rules are very usefull to create rules for Rate Limit, Forward to diffent DCs rules, rewrite Headers and URLs, track parameters, block/alert malicious client types. We've been having great experience with performance and availability as Imperva have several PoPs spread across the globe and CDN combined works just fine for us. I consider the console very easy to use, one of the most complete WAFs and yet very simple to manage. The API definition for automated management is also very complete and easy to integrate with automation solutions. We always use API for repeated tasks like updating custom SSL certs for hundreds of websites at the same time. We also use a lot of ACL policies to block IPs, URLs or countries/regions, and the exception creation is very simple as well. Security and perfomance dashboards and events are perfect too.

Pros

  • WAF Signatures are very complete and up to date.
  • Security events are great to find blocks based on very granular search criteria.
  • Security rules have a wide range of categories, criterias and actions.
  • Integration with AWS S3 and Splunk works fine.
  • API definitions foi automated management are great.

Cons

  • I wish Advanced Bot protection could be easier to manage and understand
  • I wish we had more autonomy regarding Non HTTP bypass
  • I wish we could see normal traffic (not blocks or alerts) on the console just for performance tshoot purposes.

Return on Investment

  • Imperva cache has been saving us Cloud provider budget
  • CNAME reuse for websites using the same origin servers saves licensing
  • DDoS protection saved us a lor of times from big attacks.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

AWS WAF

Other Software Used

Splunk Enterprise Security, Datadog, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Imperva WAF is easy affordable and it works

Incentivized
Verified User
Contributor in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

All externally facing sites go through Imperva. It protects us from bots, DDoS attacks, hackers, and SQL injection, as well as allows for custom policies including access from company network only NAT egress.

Pros

  • Security
  • Custom delivery settings
  • Custom Policies

Cons

  • Site onboarding
  • Site troubleshooting

Return on Investment

  • DDoS attacks don't even make it to our environment now
  • Near zero false positives

Usability

A tad on the pricey side, but still a great value

Ryan CashView profile
IT Security Analyst III in Information Technology at Tallgrass Energy (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Block some dynamic attacks such as SQL injection.
  • Block unfriendly accesses based on geographic source.
  • Helps us implement SSL in cases where the original server can't (yet).

Cons

  • The UI can use a little work (but is largely decent)

Return on Investment

  • Our on-prem firewall has less work to do, allowing it more cycles for other tasks.
  • We have better web traffic visibility and control over what actors are doing outside our network.

Alternatives Considered

Cloudflare

Usability

Other Software Used

VMware Carbon Black App Control (formerly Cb Protection), CrowdStrike Falcon Endpoint Protection, Exabeam Security Management Platform, Mimecast Secure Email Gateway

Imp-erva is Imp-pressive

Incentivized
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Alert Aggregation - Correlates different violations into perceived correlated attacks.
  • Ease of deployment - as one of the only WAFs that allow bridge mode deployment, this can be deployed with without downtime and no Network Architecture modifications. If the need for proxy is required at a later time, Transparent Reverse Proxy can be deployed within seconds and minimal configuration.
  • Custom Policies - Custom security policies are easy to configure.
  • Reporting - There are a good amount of pre-configured reports available by default.

Cons

  • Attack Correlation Validation - This specific policy produces a lot of false positives as well as the SQL injection policies. Of course it is difficult to tell what a legitimate query is on a public facing web app.
  • Profiling - I tend to spend more time than any other feature tuning the Web App Profiles. Plugins are used to help cope with this, but on extremely large web apps we are forced to turn off the profiling feature.

Return on Investment

  • Meet compliance requirements - Check.
  • Better Insight into web application - Absolutely great, checks all the traffic against RFC standards and will alert on common development mistakes that duplicate application traffic or provide attack vectors for potential attackers.
  • Have had several issues blocking a customer without producing alerts, while it happened only one week out of 2 years of working with the devices, it did produce a lot of headaches.

Other Software Used

ForeScout CounterACT, Juniper SRX, VMware ESXi