Unraveling an AI Scam with AI

The last year has seen an unprecedented surge in the use of Artificial Intelligence AI and its deployment across a variety of industries and sectors. Unfortunately, this revolutionary technology has not just captivated the good actors– the darker corners of the internet are awash with bad actors...

The Anatomy of a Scalping Bot: NSB Goes Undercover & How it Avoids Detection

In the first blog post, we introduced you to the Nike Shoe Bot NSB, one of the most dangerous scalping bots around. We outlined its purpose, its behavior, and described how we recovered its source code. In this blog post, we will take a closer look at the bots source code, and determine what...

Buyer Beware! Account Takeover Attacks Surging This Shopping Season

The prevalence of Account Takeover ATO attacks continues to rise, as the threat creeps its way to the top of the list of security concerns for organizations today. Last year, Imperva recorded a staggering 148% increase in Account Takeover attacks, as reported in the 2022 Bad Bot Report. And befor...

The Global DDoS Threat Landscape – November 2022

Every month in this space, we will post the Global DDoS Threat Landscape blog on behalf of the Imperva Threat Research team. As DDoS attacks continue to pose a significant risk to businesses, it is critical that we regularly communicate our Threat Research team’s findings to help the cybersecurit...

Harsher penalties for data breaches in new Australian privacy bill

High-profile breaches mean high-profile action In the aftermath of another crop of high-profile data breaches, the Australian Government also known as the Commonwealth Government has introduced amendments to Australian privacy law which give the regulator new powers and the ability to impose...

What is Steganography, and how can we Avoid it?

What is steganography? Steganography is, broadly, a type of covert communication involving the use of any medium to hide messages. Steganography is a relatively old technique of hiding ‘secret’ data in plain sight to avoid detection. Seeing a resurgence of late, bad actors are taking advantage of...

The Role of the Cybersecurity Leader in 2022

Who does the modern CISO need to be? According to the 2021 Gartner, Inc. Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services, the role of the chief information security officer CISO has to change in 2022 to combat the ever-evolving modern threat landscape. Eighty-eight percent of company...

How to Develop Machine Learning Skills for Every Employee in Your Company

Everyone loves Artificial Intelligence AI and Data Science DS, and it’s probably not going to change for the next decade or so. Even so, most people only have the general idea what data science is and what machine learning or AI algorithms can do. This is quite normal and a common phenomenon for...

API Security is Necessary to Stop Threats that WAFs and Bot Protection Cannot

Today, there are still API security threats that most WAFs and Advanced Bot Protection solutions cannot manage. In this post, we’ll explain these new types of threats and make some recommendations for features you need within solutions to protect your APIs. When a bad actor makes a completely val...

Gain Insight into Database Security Vulnerabilities you Didn’t Know you Had

Identifying and taking action to stop policy-violating behavior is hard enough when you have complete insight into the risks affecting your data repositories. It is virtually impossible to achieve security, however, when you cannot even see these risks to your data repositories. Unfortunately, to...

5 Ways to Determine if you do Cybersecurity or Cybersecurity Theater

For a sentient species, humans, in general, have curious ideas when it comes to reckoning and responding to risk. For example, studies show using seat belts when driving in automobiles save lives. Studies also show when cyclists use helmets more cyclists’ lives are saved. This research drives...

Imperva Mitigates Massive Bot Attack of 400 Million Requests

Imperva Advanced Bot Protection detected and stopped the largest bot attack in Imperva history. The web scraping attack targeted a global job listing site with operations in six countries. The attacker used a large-scale botnet, generating no less than 400 million bot requests from nearly 400,000...

The FP Paradox on the battlefield against COVID-19 and cyber threats

Lets consider for a moment the “next” communicable virus. You show no symptoms but you try a home testing kit anyway, expecting the result to be negative. To your great surprise, the result is positive! The information enclosed in the testing kit package explained that the test results are nearly...

Mitigating attacks in serverless environments

Serverless computing has become the fastest-growing segment in the cloud services market. The benefits are clear and significant: cost savings and lower operational overhead, giving development teams full control over code and flexibility in the infrastructure. This also means that, in terms of...

What is NYDFS?

NYDFS Cybersecurity Regulation, 23 NYCRR 500 On March 1, 2017, the New York State Department of Financial Services NYDFS introduced new cybersecurity regulations for financial services companies that address the growing threat posed by cyber-criminality to financial firms. They are intended to...

Today’s File Security is So ’80s, Part 3: Dynamic Peer Groups – 3 Examples from Customer Data

In the first two parts of this series, we discussed why permissions management, the traditional approach to file security, no longer works and introduced a new approach to file security that leverages machine learning to build dynamic peer groups based on how users actually access files. In this...

Behind the Booking: How Bots Are Undermining Airline Revenue

The airline industry is under constant attack from malicious bots. Bad actors use automation to scrape fares, hoard inventory, commit fraud, and compromise customer accounts. While every airline faces its own unique challenges, the business impacts are remarkably consistent—lost revenue, inflated...

GSocket Gambling Scavenger – How Hackers Use PHP Backdoors and GSocket to Facilitate Illegal Gambling in Indonesia

Since 1974, gambling has been officially illegal in Indonesia. However, the digital revolution of the 2000s introduced a new challenge: the rapid growth of online gambling platforms. This technological shift has created enforcement gaps, compelling the Indonesian government to intensify its effor...

How Cyberthreats Could Disrupt the Olympics

Introduction Cybersecurity experts are on high alert, as the 2024 Olympic Games continue over the coming weeks. Historically, the Olympics have been a prime target for cybercriminals, state-sponsored actors, and hacktivists. The convergence of global attention, vast amounts of sensitive data, and...

Do Any HTTP Clients Not Support SNI?

In this blog post, we’ll share the results of an internal research project we conducted on our CDN customers focused on websites that are getting non-Server Name Indication SNI traffic. The goal of our research was to answer the following questions: How much non-SNI traffic is seen? What is the...

Augmented Software Engineering in an AI Era

Artificial Intelligence AI has been making waves in many industries, and software engineering is no exception. AI has the potential to revolutionize the way software is developed, tested, and maintained, bringing a new level of automation and efficiency to the field. However, with this...

A Recap of Released Features in Q3 for Imperva’s Online Fraud Prevention Solution

Advanced Bot Protection Earlier this year, Imperva was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Bot Management, Q2 2022. Advanced Bot Protection ABP ranked at the top in the current offering category, based on criteria including the range of supported use cases, bot detection, configuration and...

Bots Hide Behind User Privacy – Should You Be Concerned?

Bot operators are perpetually devising innovative techniques to sneak past security as they go about their dubious, often downright illegal business. Emulating human behavior and traffic patterns are key elements of their strategy. One of the many layers comprising this strategy is reporting thei...

Evasive Bots Drive Online Fraud – 2022 Imperva Bad Bot Report

The 2022 Imperva Bad Bot Report is now available. The report is the ninth annual in-depth analysis of bot traffic, created with data collected from Impervas global network throughout the past year by the Imperva Threat Research Team. Bad bots are software applications that run automated tasks wit...

Data Protection as the Foundation of Trust: Celebrating Privacy Awareness Week in APAC

As part of our mission to help organisations protect their data and all paths to it, Imperva is supporting Privacy Awareness Week in Australia and Singapore, with the aim of educating individuals and organisations about the importance of data privacy and protection. In today’s digital economy, da...

How to Stop New Employees from Becoming Insider Threats

In the midst of a booming tech economy and a concurrent Great Resignation, recruitment and hiring are all-seasons imperatives. As new people constantly join the organization, how can busy security teams guarantee they will adhere to established data security practices from their onboarding and...

How to Make API Security an Integral Part of Your Application Security Strategy

The farther your organization travels down the digital transformation path, the more critical API protection is to your overall security posture. Every day, your development teams are innovating; they rely more on microservices to save time and money as they automate business-to-business processe...

7 data privacy solution features your organization needs to have

The worldwide data privacy regulation landscape is changing National laws and state/provincial laws continue to be enacted and strengthened to ensure their citizens’ data is protected and give individuals more control over how personal data is collected, used, and shared. No matter what industry...

How to Exploit SQL Server Using Registry Keys

At the Imperva Research Labs we have the chance to scrutinize various security situations. In this blog, we will take a closer look at database security on SQL Server. One routine approach that security practitioners employ to protect databases is deploying honeypots and waiting for bad actors to...

Imperva delivers mile high performance and protection with new PoPs in Denver and Dublin

We are very pleased to announce that we are extending our global coverage with the addition of two new PoPs points of presence in Denver in the US and Dublin, Ireland. The new PoPs will enhance Imperva’s existing network to provide enhanced protection against distributed denial of service DDoS...

The Advantages and Risks of Serverless Computing

Organizations are increasingly embracing serverless computing for its convenience and cost-effectiveness. But many IT teams are blindly embracing this innovation in cloud technology without consulting their security peers. As a result, we can expect to see a growing number of cyber-attacks in thi...

Life post-acquisition: A people-centric plan to get you total data security a lot faster

Getting acquired can be an emotional rodeo. Some days are crazy excitement and others are heartache over the unknowns ahead. It’s natural – we’re human. I remember years ago sitting in a doctor’s office staring at a poster about the “10 most stressful life events” and “starting a new job” was 4...

Women in Tech and Career Spotlight: Inna Shalom

The latest in our series featuring women in tech at Imperva is my interview with Inna Shalom, the data insight team lead at Imperva. She spoke about her professional journey and experience working in the cybersecurity industry. Tell us how you got into cybersecurity. IS: I spent the first six yea...

Data Protection and the GDPR Job Market

The May 2018 deadline for full GDPR compliance will be upon us all before we know it. The GDPR will affect all organizations—regardless of their location—that handle personal data coming out of the EU. Article 37 of the GDPR requires organizations to retain a data protection officer DPO if, among...

3 Steps to Protecting Sensitive Data

Cyber criminals, compromised insiders, malicious users, hacktivists. It seems like everyone is getting in on the threat game. In fact, despite efforts to prevent them, last year the U.S. experienced a 40% increase in data breaches according to a report by the Identity Theft Resource Center and...

Understanding the Capacity Management Challenges of Database Monitoring Solutions

Database monitoring requires hardware resources such as storage space and processing power that can withstand the volume of database usage in your organization. A higher usage volume will require more resources. So how can you optimize the resources used by your database monitoring solution? Do y...

QUIC-LEAK (CVE-2025-54939): New High-Risk Pre-Handshake Remote Denial of Service in LSQUIC QUIC Implementation

Imperva Offensive team discovered that threat actors could smuggle malformed packets to exhaust memory and crash QUIC servers even before a connection handshake is established, therefore, bypassing QUIC connection-level safeguards. Executive Summary QUIC-LEAK CVE-2025-54939 is a newly discovered...

The Rise of Agentic AI: Uncovering Security Risks in AI Web Agents

In our first post, we introduced the world of AI web agents - defining what they are, outlining their core capabilities, and surveying the leading frameworks that make them possible. Now, we’re shifting gears to look at the other side of the coin: the vulnerabilities and attack surfaces that aris...

Cyberattack on Swedish Gambling Site During Eurovision Highlights Strategic Threats

Every year, the Eurovision Song Contest captivates millions of viewers across Europe and beyond, turning a simple music competition into a cultural phenomenon. This popularity extends to various forms of betting, with numerous gambling sites offering odds on Eurovision outcomes. Eurovision has...

The CISO’s Top Priority: Elevating Data-Centric Security

The shift to cloud computing has enhanced the resilience and security of most organizations. In this era of unparalleled agility and scalability, data-centric security can offer transformational opportunities for Chief Information Security Officers CISOs to improve data protection, compliance, an...

Taking Time to Understand NIS2 Reporting Requirements

The newest version of the European Union Network and Information Systems directive, or NIS2, came into force in January 2023. Member States have until October 2024 to transpose it into their national law. One of the most critical changes with NIS2 is the schedule for reporting a cybersecurity...

Are HTTP Content-Security-Policy (CSP) Headers Sufficient to Secure Your Client Side?

Modern web frameworks have shifted business logic from the server side to the client side web browser, enhancing performance, flexibility, and user experience. However, this move introduces security and privacy concerns, as exposing sensitive logic and data can lead to vulnerabilities like code...

Breaking the Chain of Data Access: The Importance of Separating Human and Application Users

Data, the lifeblood of any organization, relies on the database as its beating heart. As a result, businesses invest heavily in designing and monitoring all access to it. In traditional literature, there are two types of users: administrative users, who manage the entire lifecycle of a database...

How Ticket Scalping Impacts Asia’s Live Entertainment Industry

Asia’s booming live entertainment industry has recently been plagued by a growing problem of ticket scalping. The term refers to the act of purchasing live event tickets in bulk by individuals, often through the use of automation aka bots, to later resell them at exorbitant prices. The issue isn’...

Why Agentless DAM is a Better Option for Securing Cloud Data

In the context of on-premises database activity monitoring DAM, security teams use agents to enable them to see all requests coming into the databases as well as all responses going out of the databases. In other words, the agent-based approach enables database activity monitoring independent of...

What is Quantum Computing, and Why Should Security Professionals Care?

Quantum computing basics Quantum computing embraces the laws of quantum mechanics to solve those problems that are currently too challenging for even the most high-performance modern computers. Across the board, it is a fundamental shift in computing with the potential to alter the way business i...

Why Imperva is a Cybersecurity Awareness Month Champion

This is our second consecutive year as a champion of Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Nowadays, IT security is everyone’s responsibility, and that’s something we take very seriously. Cybersecurity Awareness Month raises awareness of the core principles behind cybersecurity and highlights the key...

SaaS Eliminates Barriers to Applying Security Controls to Your Entire AWS and Azure Data Repository

Businesses today widely regard data as “the new oil,” the most valuable resource on earth. At the same time, we are in the midst of the most dynamic IT landscape in history which is increasing the risk to this most valuable asset. Organizations, without sufficiently skilled staff to effectively...

Are you getting the most out of your security platform investment?

In the last few years, most organizations had to accelerate their digital transformation to continue operations during the pandemic. However, as more software, applications, and data architectures were added to the technology stack, the number of tools implemented to secure these assets became...

“Don’t touch that server. Ralf set that up, and we don’t know what it does.”

Based on a true story… More than a couple of decades ago, I went to work for a network and web company as their customer marketing department. It was a crazy time. Online marketing was all about getting on DMOZ, Lycos was still a puppy, asking Jeeves felt like talking to an AI, and how you laid o...