BOT Protection On Azure WAF

Microsoft has announced that the WAF bot protection feature has reached general availability on Azure Application Gateway starting this week.

Azure WAF is a cloud-native service designed to protect customers’ web applications from bot attacks, common exploits, as well as common web vulnerabilities, including cross-site scripting, SQL injection, broken auth, security misconfigurations, and more.

This allows users to enable a managed bot protection rule set for their WAF to block or log requests from known malicious IP addresses.The newly added bot protection rule set can also be used alongside OWASP core rule sets to provide additional protection for your web apps malicious action uch as scraping, scanning, and looking for vulnerabilities in web applications. 

Once the bot protection rule is set up on Azure WAF via Application Gateway, bots using known malicious IP addresses sourced from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence feed are automatically blocked from using up your servers’ resources or checking them for exploitable security gaps.

The steps required to configure a bot protection rule set include:

1. Creating a basic WAF policy for Application Gateway.
2. In the Basic policy page that you created previously, under Settings, select Rules.
3. On the details page, under the Manage rules section, from the drop-down menu, select the check box for the bot Protection rule, and then select Save.