The World Cup: Prime Time for Sports Fans and Cybercriminals

From November 20 to December 18, fans from all over the world are tuned into the World Cup tournament in Qatar. While this is a major event for sports fans, it’s also prime time for bad actors. Large sporting events lead to increased levels of activity across sports and gambling sites, along with...

The 5 Core Principles of the 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...

How Imperva Mitigates Security Threats in Oracle Cloud Infrastructures

Most organizations today rely on an unprecedented number of computing resources to build, deploy and scale the workflows and applications they need to succeed. They are responsible for more data than ever before, on-premises and in the cloud, which presents them with challenges they’ve never face...

Why a Resilient Content Delivery Network (CDN) is Key to Website Performance

Today’s online users have built-up certain standards of quality when visiting a website. They expect a high performance website with fast page load times and easily accessible, fresh and dynamic content. They also expect to enjoy a seamless and secure experience without downtime or limitations to...

Multiple Imperva Products Earn 2022 Fortress Cyber Security Awards

In June, the Business Intelligence Group announced that three Imperva products have earned the 2022 Fortress Cyber Security Awards. The mission of this prestigious award program is to identify and reward leading companies and products globally that are successfully keeping data and electronic...

Bad Bots and the Commoditization of Online Fraud

Fraudsters will stop at nothing to exploit your websites and customers, and with the accelerated shift to digital payments, online fraud has never been more profitable. This shift, catalyzed by the pandemic, really gained traction in 2021 as the popularity of digital payments exploded. In fact,...

Why Customers Asked us for a Data Security Fabric (Even When They Didn’t Know to ask for it by Name)

Our journey to the data security fabric started a while back when we built the industry’s first data security platform based on what customers said they needed and working with customers as design partners. The concept of a software platform has been around for a long time. Like all platforms, we...

How to use the Gartner® 2022 Strategic Roadmap for Data Security Platform Convergence

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin Evolution and innovation form the basis of most modern business mission statements. However, the same organizations pursuing growth and change often do not put...

Why Insisting on Complicated Passwords can be a Dangerous Security Practice

According to the Forester Insider Threat report, commissioned by Imperva in 2021, 50% of the companies surveyed plan to increase security awareness among their employees over the next 12 months. Many are already doing so and have solid practices in place. According to the 2022 Ponemon Report on t...

What is Shift-Left Testing and What are the Benefits?

Back in the infancy of software creation, certainly up until the mid-90s when we still used more traditional software development practices, most testing was conducted at the end of the production cycle on a graph, this would be to the right on the development timeline. Shift-left takes this...

Why you need to rethink your data security strategy and go beyond DLP

The increasing frequency and scale of data breaches has highlighted the need for organizations to rethink their approach to data security. Data Loss Prevention DLP technologies have been around for decades and formed a large part of many organizations’ data protection strategies. However, there i...

Caveat Cyber Emptor: 3 Ways to Protect Sensitive Personal Data this Online Shopping Season

The phrase caveat emptor, Latin for “let the buyer beware”, has long been a warning to carefully scrutinize the quality and suitability of goods before making a purchase. In the world of eCommerce, caveat emptor has a whole new meaning. After meticulously researching any number of crowdsourcing...

How to help your DevOps teams become integral to your cybersecurity strategy

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? It’s a classic paradox, but anyone who has witnessed the relationship between SecOps and DevOps teams in any enterprise may have an inkling of how that might unfold. There is nothing new about the contentious relationship between...

Bad Bot Report 2021: The Pandemic of the Internet

The 8th Annual Bad Bot Report is now available from Imperva. Created using data from Imperva’s Threat Research Lab, it provides a comprehensive look at the bad bot landscape and the impact that this malicious traffic has across multiple industries. Bad bot traffic amounted to 25.6 percent of all...

Five Ways Bad Bots Are Threatening Financial Services

For years now, the biggest security concerns for businesses in the financial services sector have mainly been related to data security, privacy, compliance and everything in between. Nevertheless, application security is equally as important and complex, as it consists of multiple potential attac...

Achieving Product Platform mindset

Imperva has decided to gradually shift to a company-wide Platform mindset in which, instead of having a set of separate products and features, there is a set of capabilities and building blocks upon which the products and features are built. Until now, special Platform teams have developed Platfo...

Monitor More, Worry Less. Outpace Threats With Machine Learning.

In the past two years, enterprises have created more data than has been created in the entire history of humankind. At scale, securing this amount of data requires a re-think of how we grant and revoke access to sensitive files and, more importantly, how we identify and track the inevitable acces...

Early 2025 DDoS Attacks Signal a Dangerous Trend in Cybersecurity

As we enter 2025, the threat landscape continues to evolve, with Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attacks growing in both scale and sophistication. So far this year, we’ve already seen several major DDoS attacks over 5 million Requests Per Second RPS, signaling a concerning trend for...

Imperva’s Wildest 2025 AppSec Predictions

Humans are spectacularly bad at predicting the future. Which is why, when someone appears to be able to do it on a regular basis, they are hailed as visionaries, luminaries and celebrated with cool names like Nostradamus and The Amazing Kreskin. Nostradamus made his fame on predictions about the...

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...

81% Increase in Large-Volume DDoS Attacks

Since 2021, distributed denial of service DDoS attacks have trended upwards, both in volume and frequency. Layer 7 DDoS attacks of at least 500,000 requests per second RPS increased 81% in the past year. In addition to greater frequency, attack sizes were larger in 2022 than in 2021. The largest...

Record 25.3 Billion Request Multiplexing DDoS Attack Mitigated by Imperva

On June 27, 2022, Imperva mitigated a single attack with over 25.3 billion requests, setting a new record for Imperva’s application DDoS mitigation solution. While attacks with over one million requests per second RPS aren’t new, we’ve previously only seen them last for several seconds to a few...

Imperva Is a Magic Quadrant Leader for Web Application and API Protection (again)

With the summer coming to a close we are now entering into “Magic Quadrant” season for the application security market and this means the latest edition of the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Web and API Protection. Well, we are pleased with the result because once again Imperva has been...

In the Fight Against DDoS Attacks, not all PoPs are Created Equal

A distributed denial of service DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to make an online service unavailable to users, usually by temporarily interrupting or suspending the services of its hosting server. A DDoS attack is launched from numerous compromised devices, often distributed globally in what ...

US Websites Targeted by 40% of the Bad Bot Traffic Worldwide

Bad bot attacks are often the first indicator of fraudulent activity targeting your website. This activity may be over-the-top, like validating stolen user credentials and credit card information to later be sold on the dark web or scraping proprietary data to gain a competitive advantage. Bot...

Four Main Reasons Shoppers Abandon eCommerce Carts

More than just window shopping eCommerce shopping cart abandonment causes brands a sobering USD 18 Billion in annual revenue Forrester Research. While rates differ by device, with mobile and tablet device users most likely to leave before completing their order, nearly 70 percent of shoppers dese...

The Benefits of Including Static Data Masking in Your Security Arsenal

Static data masking SDM is defined as, “The act of permanently replacing sensitive data at rest with a realistic fictional equivalent for the purpose of protecting data from unwanted disclosure.” Industry analysts characterize SDM as a must-have data protection layer capable of protecting large...

7 Facts About Insider Threats That Should Make you Rethink Data Security

In the report, Insider Threats Drive Data Protection Improvements, Forrester Research asserts that most organizations are making positive steps toward protecting the sensitive data they are migrating to the cloud. However, Forrester suggests that many have not devised a comprehensive plan that...

3 Recommendations to Ensure Your API Security Solution can Drive Data Visibility and Quality

Today at least 90% of developers are using APIs in cloud-native web application development. According to new data collected by Forrester Research and presented in their report, Improve API Performance with a Sound API Security Strategy, 62 percent of IT decision makers believe the value they gai...

A Search for API Security in the Operator’s Tool Box

Much has been written about modern application security tools and solutions from the provider’s perspective about their functionality and security features. When I was asked to write a blog about API Gateways and API Security, I felt it may be more useful to think about the subject from the user’...

By the Numbers: The State of Security in eCommerce

The ongoing global pandemic has accelerated eCommerce growth and pushed more consumers online. More consumers mean a larger threat landscape and ensure that cybersecurity issues remain a significant, ongoing challenge for the retail industry. Based on a 12-month analysis by Imperva Research Labs,...

When data privacy and protection are rights, don’t get it wrong

Twenty-one years ago, Latanya Sweeney showed that it’s possible to uniquely identify 87% of Americans with just three pieces of personal data: gender, ZIP code and full date of birth. Long before anyone had heard the words ‘data lake’, ‘cloud storage’ or ‘big data’, nevermind ‘social media’, it w...

Bad bots continue to evolve. Your mitigation strategy should, too.

With the global pandemic continuing to catalyze digitalization, we’ve seen two years worth of digital transformation take place in a mere two months, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Clearly, bad actors are capitalizing on the opportunities that digital transformation creates, as more da...

Imperva A Seven-Time Magic Quadrant Leader and Named Highest for Completeness of Vision for WAF

Gartner has published its 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls WAF and Imperva has been named a Leader for the seventh consecutive year! It’s rare to be a part of defining a market and even less common to lead that market through a fundamental shift. Leading the market throug...

DDoS Attacks Grow More Sophisticated as Imperva Mitigates Largest Attack

Only a few months ago Imperva reported mitigating against two of the largest DDoS attacks of 2020. However, in the past few weeks we’ve observed a rise in the number of DDoS attacks against our customers where both the volume of attacks and their level of intensity have increased significantly. O...

Reputation Intelligence At Your Fingertips

How important is a reputation? American entertainer Will Rogers once famously said, “it takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute.” Our reputations are valuable commodities that establish rapport and clout among our colleagues, partners, and customers. A good...

I know where you rode last summer: Uncovering the security issues of shared scooter services

We recently discovered flaws in the security of shared electric scooter services that have worrying implications for the safety and privacy of their users. Not only is it possible to remotely ring the bells of scooters all over the world, but external parties are able to track the location and...

Good Bots In. Bad Bots Out.

More than half of Internet traffic today comes from bots. These non-human visitors crawl the web constantly, their numbers are increasing, and they are getting smarter and more human-like by the minute. Imperva has been tracking these trends for more than five years, in an ongoing statistical stu...

Can a License Solve Your Cloud Migration Problem?

No, but it can certainly reduce friction. Cloud adoption is no longer an if, but a when. Even Gartner says there’s no such thing as a ‘no cloud policy.’ The winds of technology change are blowing, but no enterprise is talking about 100% cloud adoption in the near term. Hybrid IT environments are...

Native Auditing Tools – Performance, Cost, and Compliance Issues

As we covered in a previous post, data-centric security measures need to be implemented to meet compliance requirements and protect against complex, ever-evolving attacks. There are two primary approaches to implementing these measures: Native auditing, which uses a database server's built-in too...

Why it Pays to Have a Comprehensive API Security Strategy

In an era dominated by digital connectivity and rapid technological advancements, Application Programming Interfaces APIs play a pivotal role in facilitating seamless communication and data exchange between diverse software applications. As API usage continues to grow, so does the need for robust...

Navigating the Waters of Generative AI

Part I: The Good and the Bad of AI Few would argue that 2023 was the year AI, specifically generative AI Gen AI like ChatGPT, was discussed everywhere. In October, Forrester published a report about how security tools will leverage AI. The findings in that report showed that Gen AI would augment...

Why Cool Dashboards Don’t Equal Effective Security Analytics

Mark Twain once said, “Data is like garbage. You’d better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it.” This statement rings true in todays cybersecurity landscape. Security professionals are inundated with a flood of data, and often, they dont know how to make sense of it. To add...

Behind the Scenes of a Tailor-Made Massive Phishing Campaign

A global phishing campaign caught our attention after one of our colleagues was targeted by, and nearly fell victim, to a social engineering attack. The campaign involved more than 800 different scam domains and impersonated around 340 legitimate companies all over the world – including well-know...

Why Healthcare Cybercrime is the Perfect Storm

Its Friday night. You, your husband, and your two children are settling in for a fun pizza and movie night together. Unexpectedly, your elderly neighbor, Anne, calls in a panic. Her husband Steve is having severe chest pains. While Anne has already called emergency services, she asks that you com...

How the Modern Data Landscape Made the Traditional Cybersecurity Approach Obsolete

From the news headlines, we know that data breaches are on the rise - both in frequency and scale. While this reality is unsettling, it’s not surprising. That is because the volume of data being collected and stored by organizations continues to grow exponentially each year. Every day, the global...

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...

What are Dating Apps Doing to Protect Their Users?

A very public affair When asked about the pitfalls and problems behind using dating apps, users cite data security as one of the most worrying elements of online dating. Since the Ashley Madison breach in July 2015, online dating sites have repeatedly been under media scrutiny for the poor...

How to Teach Colleagues About the Dangers of Phishing

Every day worldwide, tens of thousands of employees fall prey to phishing scams. In the second quarter of 2022, the Anti-Phishing Working Group APWG saw 1,097,811 total phishing attacks, the worst quarter on record. The results can be devastating: from lost data and identity theft to compromised...

Calculate Splunk Ingestion Costs Savings when Pre-Processing Data Repository Logs with Imperva DSF

If you use Splunk to ingest all your data for security analytics, you likely recognize it as one of the greatest indexing tools ever created. With Splunk, your security teams get a real-time view of machine data from the network, data center, or IT environments. Many enterprises also use Splunk t...