Web Application Security
Stop OWASP Top 10 attacks, credential stuffing, and zero-day exploits before they reach your origin.
What you're up against.
Bots that look legitimate
Modern credential stuffing and scraping bots mimic real browser behaviour. Signature-based rules built for yesterday's threats miss the ones causing real damage today.
Zero-day exploits
New attack vectors emerge faster than vendors ship signatures. Without active tuning and threat intelligence, your WAF is perpetually one step behind.
False positives blocking real customers
An overly aggressive WAF blocks legitimate users and drives up support costs. Calibrating the balance requires engineers who know your actual traffic patterns.
From deployment to continuous operation.
Deploy
We onboard your applications onto Akamai App & API Protector, configured for your specific traffic patterns and application architecture from day one.
Tune
Our engineers baseline your legitimate traffic and calibrate rules to your application — not generic templates that generate noise and false positives.
Monitor
24/7 alerting, false-positive review, and bot intelligence updates keep your defences current as attack patterns evolve.
Operate
Monthly rule reviews, incident response support, and continuous refinement as your application and threat landscape change.
What's included.
WAF — OWASP Top 10
Full coverage of injection attacks, XSS, CSRF, and the complete Top 10 catalog, tuned to your application's actual traffic.
Bot Management
Real-time detection and mitigation of credential stuffing, scraping, and synthetic traffic at the edge before it reaches your origin.
Account Takeover Prevention
Identify and stop ATO attempts before fraudulent access is established, using behavioural signals and global reputation data.
API Protection
Extend WAF policies to REST and GraphQL APIs — applying the same rigour to your API surface as your web front end.
Client Reputation Scoring
Edge-level IP and client scoring based on threat intelligence aggregated across Akamai's 1.3 trillion daily requests.
Adaptive Rate Limiting
Rate limits tuned to legitimate user patterns — not blunt per-IP thresholds that block real users during peak traffic.
Akamai's Bot Manager draws on signals from over 1.3 trillion daily interactions across the world's largest edge network — accuracy no point solution can match.
Common questions.
What is the difference between a WAF and a traditional firewall?
A traditional firewall controls access at the network layer - IP addresses, ports, and protocols. A WAF operates at the application layer, inspecting the content of HTTP/HTTPS requests for attack patterns like SQL injection, XSS, and API abuse. You need both: a firewall blocks unwanted connections, a WAF blocks malicious application traffic that looks like legitimate requests.
How long does WAF deployment take?
For a standard web application, onboarding to Akamai App and API Protector typically takes 1-3 days. We then run a 2-4 week tuning period, baselining your legitimate traffic before moving to active blocking mode - so you are protected without false positives from day one.
Will a WAF slow down my website?
No. Akamai's WAF runs at the edge - traffic is inspected before it reaches your origin servers. Inspection latency is sub-millisecond, and the proximity of edge nodes to your users often improves overall performance compared to direct origin connections.
How do you handle zero-day vulnerabilities?
Akamai's threat intelligence team publishes emergency rule updates, typically within hours of a major CVE disclosure. Our engineers apply and validate these rules on your configuration same day, with 24/7 coverage for critical incidents - so you are protected before most organisations have even read the advisory.
Let's plan your next move.
A 30-minute consultation with one of our senior architects. Walk away with a clear, vendor-neutral assessment of your security and performance posture.