Do CAPTCHAs work and what’s the alternative?

We know youre busy, so the answer is “No”. Users want less friction, and a good bot detection and mitigation solution will do the job MUCH better. The first lesson on the first day of UI school is that users want the path of least resistance. While the gamification of cybersecurity does have a...

Don’t Be a Victim of Cyber Extortion

There’s no doubt that cybercrime is on the rise, and bad actors are constantly on the lookout for vulnerabilities. In the first half of 2020 data breaches exposed over 36 billion records. Attacks are becoming more wide-spread and more prolific. Malicious hackers are exploiting zero-day...

Bad Bot Report 2020: Bad Bots Strike Back

The 7th Annual Bad Bot Report is now available from Imperva. Prepared by data from Imperva’s Threat Research Lab, it provides a comprehensive look at the bad bot landscape and the impact of this malicious traffic across multiple industries. Bad bot traffic rose to 24.1%, it’s highest proportion...

Automating API Security in the Cloud

These days, the most common way for services to communicate and transfer data is by using APIs. However, broken, exposed, or hacked APIs are the cause of some of the latest major data breaches, as they have the potential to expose sensitive data for public consumption. Securing your APIs is...

Our Analysis of 1,019 Phishing Kits

In recent years phishing activity has grown rapidly, with thousands of phishing sites popping for a virtual moment that last weeks, days or even hours, before becoming ineffective—either getting blacklisted by security providers, or brought down by internet providers and authorities, or in most...

How can we Prevent an Internet of Compromised Things?

The shape of things to come An increasing array of physical household and business objects now come with a plethora of sensors, software, and processing abilities, connecting to like-minded devices and swapping data with additional systems via the internet or across networks. These objects and...

13 Cybersecurity Horror Stories to Give you Sleepless Nights

Are we sitting comfortably? Twas a dark and stormy night, and the cybersecurity team stood patiently in their Scrum meeting. “Tell us a tale,” the CISO said, and one of their number raised their hand. They caught the eye of their colleagues, and began… 1. An artists tale Curious reader, gird thy...

Why the Search for Best-Of-Breed Tooling is Causing Issues for Security Teams

The growing need to consolidate vendor portfolios The adoption of best-of-breed security solutions has led to unforeseen problems for SOCs. Onboarding a new solution increases complexity; it requires configuration, integration with existing tools, fine-tuning policies, and the ability to create...

Research Shows the Annual Cost of API Security-related Breaches is Mind-blowing

Application Programming Interfaces APIs have emerged as useful tools that streamline business operations and enhance the digital experience for customers. As their use has become more widespread, they are a much more prominent part of the cyber threat landscape. API-related hacks and data breache...

From basic text to streaming 4K movies: A brief history of the World Wide Web

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote his proposal for the World Wide Web WWW in 1989, he probably didn’t predict just how much his ideas would change the way we communicate. With about 1.83 billion websites to date, the World Wide Web has been the cornerstone of the information age. Famously Berners-Le...

New Cyber Threat Index Shows Industries Are Under Attack in Uncertain Times

It has been more than a month since businesses around the world started to implement contingencies in response to the Coronavirus. The Cyber Threat Index Report by Imperva Research Labs tracks changes in traffic and attack trends across multiple industries and countries. This month’s edition look...

Cloud Migration Fundamentals

The advantages offered by a cloud-based environment make it an easy decision for most companies to make. Still, there are numerous critical choices to be made that can transform the complexities of the migration process into a relatively smooth transition—especially regarding application and data...

Three Ways to Use Data Classification Scan Results

In July we launched Classifier, a free data classification tool that allows you to quickly and easily uncover sensitive data in your databases. Since its launch, the tool has been widely used around the globe, which comes as no surprise given the heightened focus on data protection. Furthermore,...

The Rising Cost of Vulnerable APIs and Bot Attacks – A $186 Billion Wake-Up Call for Businesses

How much do bot attacks and API insecurity cost organizations? To answer these questions, Imperva engaged the Marsh McLennan Cyber Risk Intelligence Center to analyze incident data related to vulnerable APIs and bot attacks. Imperva’s latest report, “The Economic Impact of API and Bot Attacks,"...

HTTP/2 CONTINUATION Flood Vulnerability

HTTP/2, a widely adopted web communication protocol, organizes data transmission through a binary framing layer, wherein all communication is divided into smaller messages called frames, each identified by a specific type, such as headers, data, and continuation frames. HTTP/2 HEADER frames...

Compromising Bank Customer Trust: The Price of Inadequate Data Protection

Banks hold not just money, but also emotions and aspirations. Countless stories unfold within bank walls, reflecting the intimate connection between money and emotion. Beyond the numbers and transactions, every dollar represents individuals’ hopes, dreams, and livelihoods. As the trusted custodia...

How DevOps can protect cloud applications from cyberattacks

Many organizations today are moving away from centralized on-prem operations and towards highly scalable cloud solutions such as Amazon’s AWS Lambda functionality. This provides cost-saving benefits and reduces the overall management of an enterprise tech stack. Cloud computing architecture also...

Attack Analytics Helps You Find the Monsters Under the Bed

Alert fatigue kills data breach detection efforts Is there anything more frightening than missing a cyber attack? For most organizations, the answer is no. However, for many security teams, it’s challenging to tune alerts properly to minimize false positives and still be alerted to potential...

Gone Ape? How to Protect NFTs from Theft

What are NFTs? Non-fungible tokens NFTs are unique and irreplaceable digital assets that, by their nature, have an intrinsic value. These could be digital art, photography, GIFs, avatars, memes, 3D objects, domain names, trading cards, virtual land, music, or other digitally tradable tokens. Each...

Web Scraping: The Fine Line Between Business Intelligence and Data Privacy Violation. Is it Legal?

Web Scraping is the use of automated software also known as bots to extract content and data from a website. It is also classified by the OWASP as an automated threat OAT-011. Web Scraping differs from Screen Scraping in that it can extract underlying HTML code and data that is stored in database...

How a DDoS Attack on an Internet Service Provider Can Paralyze Critical Infrastructure

The motivation behind Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attacks is often unknown. In some cases it might be cyber-vandalism, causing disruption for disruption’s sake. In other cases it might be down to hactivism, reaction to a cause or an event. And while DDoS attacks on business enterprises can...

Post-Pandemic world, Shut-downs, and Web Security Connections

As the anniversary of the World Health Organization’s WHO declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic approaches, we, here in Silicon Valley, have great hope for 2021. As the vaccine distribution continues to trickle to Main Street, Californians have recently exited a stay-at-home mandate that has nearl...

Imperva Wants to Hear From YOU!

Imperva is pleased to announce UserVoice, a new product feedback system that allows YOU to shape the future of Imperva product lines. UserVoice empowers Imperva users to share feedback and ideas in one comprehensive, crowd-sourced place where they can also see and react to the ideas others submit...

Managing Security in a DevOps Environment

DevOps is a software development practice in which development and operations engineers collaborate during the entire product lifecycle. With the adoption of DevOps at mainstream levels, we now see security starting to take a bigger role in DevOps’ day-to-day responsibilities. From a security...

Move Securely to the Cloud: WAF Requirements and Deployment Options

Moving to the cloud has become an overwhelmingly popular trend even among organizations that were at first reluctant to make the move. Wherever you are in your cloud migration plan, it can take time, sometimes years, and often starts with first moving peripheral workloads to the cloud while leavi...

Imperva Customers Protected Against “wp2shell” Pre-Authentication RCE in WordPress Core

TL;DR : A critical pre-authentication Remote Code Execution RCE vulnerability, dubbed "wp2shell" CVE-2026-63030, has been identified in WordPress Core. This vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable WordPress installation without any preconditions,...

How to Eliminate Deployment Bottlenecks Without Sacrificing Application Security

Today, organizations increasingly rely on DevOps to accelerate software delivery, improve operational efficiency, and enhance business performance. According to RedGate, 74% have adopted DevOps, and according to Harvard Business Review Analytics, 77% of organizations currently depend on DevOps to...

My Journey To CTO for Imperva App Sec

I’m delighted to be announcing that I’ve joined Imperva as the CTO for Application Security. Many of you readers know me as the Forrester analyst covering Zero Trust, SASE, and network security since before the pandemic. But what you might not have known is prior to that, I was in application...

PCI DSS 4.0.1: New Clarifications on Client-Side Security – What You Need to Know

As a leading provider of web application and API security solutions, Imperva is committed to helping merchants, payment processors, and anyone seeking to comply with the latest PCI DSS requirements. We previously discussed the changes introduced in PCI DSS 4.0. This blog will cover the...

Applying Data Ontology Concepts to Protect Data

Data breaches continue to be the thorn for most organizations despite the sophisticated and innovative cybersecurity tools that are used to stop what is now the inevitable cost of doing business in a hyperconnected world. In this blog post, I’ll explain how organizations can increase the...

The Five Principles of a Zero Trust Cybersecurity Model

When even the US Government concludes that to ensure baseline security practices are in place and to realize the security benefits of cloud-based infrastructure while mitigating associated risks, they must migrate to a zero trust model, every organization should be actively moving in that...

Holiday “to-do list” for cybersecurity professionals working in eCommerce

The period from mid-November to the end of the year is always particularly stressful for cybersecurity professionals in the eCommerce space. It seems like every hacker and cyber criminal on earth is trying even harder to steal customers’ data or stop digital business operations. And the reason it...

Gartner report recommends a smart approach to enterprises needing to incorporate data privacy capabilities to manage evolving regulatory guidelines

In a recent Gartner report The State of Privacy and Personal Data Protection, 2020-2022, the authors assume that “through 2022, privacy-driven spending on compliance tooling will increase to more than US$8 billion worldwide. By 2023, 65 percent of the world’s population will have its personal...

Prepare for more sophisticated security threats in 2021

As computing becomes more distributed to achieve greater optimization and efficiency, the threats posed by cyberattackers are destined to become increasingly more sophisticated. Here are some steps organizations should take in 2021 to mitigate such sophisticated security threats. Start with...

How bad bots are targeting the healthcare sector

Credential cracking, or password spraying, is one of the most effective ways for cybercriminals to get access to user accounts. It refers to the brute-force automated cracking, or pairing of usernames and passwords by using sophisticated high-speed bots. According to a National Cyber Awareness...

Inside a New DDoS Amplification Attack Vector via Memcached Servers

We recently saw a new DDoS amplification attack vector via memcached servers that culminated in two massive DDoS amplification attacks on February 28. Both attacks were mitigated successfully. Here’s how memchached servers work and how the attacks unfolded. Memcached servers Unless updated within...

7 Steps to Protect Your Data From Insider Threats

Like it or not, your greatest risk is already on the payroll. When internal users with trusted access to data are careless, become compromised or have malicious intent, enterprise data is exposed. Just ask the CIA. Detecting insider threats, however, is challenging for organizations due to the...

Real-Time Webhook Notifications: No More Lost Security Alerts

Every security team knows the pain: a critical alert lands in someone’s inbox, buried under dozens of other emails, or filtered out by a spam rule. By the time anyone sees it, the incident is already in full swing—no ticket opened, no Slack message sent, no automated workflow triggered. The...

Imperva Defends Against LLM Hacking

In the evolving landscape of cybersecurity, the advent of large language models LLMs has introduced a new frontier of challenges and opportunities. Research has shown advanced LLMs, such as GPT-4, now possess the ability to autonomously execute sophisticated cyberattacks, including blind database...

Seven Cybersecurity Tips to Protect Your Retail Business This Holiday Season

It’s no secret that the holiday season is the busiest time for online retailers, with sales starting as early as October and stretching until late December. According to the NRF, census data suggests that 2023 holiday sales experienced a 3.8% growth, reaching a record $964.4 billion about $3,000...

Enhancing Security with AI: Revolutionizing Protection in the Digital Era

In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, the integration of Artificial Intelligence AI and Machine Learning ML has emerged as a transformative force. AI, with its ability to mimic human cognition and problem-solving capabilities, combined with MLs capacity to iteratively learn from data, ...

Overcoming Challenges in Delivering Machine Learning Models from Research to Production

So, you’ve finished your research. You developed a machine learning ML model, tested, and validated it and you’re now ready to start development, and then push the model to production. The hard work -- the research -- is finally behind you. Or is it? Understanding the Challenges in Machine Learni...

Imperva Stops Hordes of Bots from Hijacking Financial Accounts in Largest Recorded Account Takeover Attack

Consider for a moment that an army of bots is setting their sights on your website. They target your login page and hammer it with millions of requests in an ongoing attack that lasts days, raising your infrastructure and fraud prevention costs. Would this frighten you? What if this barrage of bo...

Massive Multi-Vector 1.37 Tbps DDoS Attack Mitigated by Imperva DDoS Protection

On July 22, an Imperva customer was targeted by a network DDoS attack that reached a maximum bandwidth of 1.37 trillion bits per second Tbps, making it one of the largest attacks that Imperva has stopped and one of the larger DDoS attacks on record. The attack lasted a little over two hours in...

Top Challenges to Implementing Data Privacy: Nailing Down Discovery and Classification First is Key

Why Discover and Classify is so critical Ice hockey goal-scoring great Wayne Gretzky is reported to have said, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” The data security version of this quip is “you protect zero percent of the data you can’t see” and the data privacy version is “if you...

The cost of data security – it’s not just about the numbers

Organizations striving to improve their security posture often find this a multi-faceted challenge. In addition to the security product evaluation itself, security budgets are tight and justification is a necessary step. Financial language, however, is not everyone’s forte - and fiscal presentati...

With SLAs for DDoS Mitigation, the devil is in the details

When it comes to choosing the right DDoS protection there are many factors to consider including Network Capacity, Reliability, Service, Price and Time to Mitigation TTM. In a recent survey, we asked participants what factor they considered most critical when choosing a DDoS protection solution...

Six paths to a job in cybersecurity

Like many high-tech businesses, the cybersecurity industry is facing a widening skills gap. One of the main reasons why many companies do not have effective data security practices is the lack of actual skilled cybersecurity practitioners. In a November 2019 report, the International Information...

The pitfalls of relying only on your ISP for DDoS protection

Relying on your Internet Service Provider ISP for DDoS protection is like going to a restaurant known for the freshest, tastiest seafood and ordering beef. Sure, they have it on the menu and they are happy to sell it to you, but the experience is not likely to compare well to what you’d have in a...

5 high-profile DDoS attacks that should chill you to the bone

Distributed denial of service DDoS attacks are malicious attempts to make an online service unavailable to users, usually by temporarily interrupting or suspending the services of its hosting server. Data revealed in the 2021 DDoS Threat Landscape Report strongly suggests attacks are constantly...