Microsoft recently announced that WAF (Web Application Firewall) bot safety tool has attained general availability status on Azure Application Gateway from this week. Azure WAF is a cloud based feature built to safeguard client web applications from bot attacks, general web vulnerabilities and common exploits, including SQL injection, cross site scripting, security misconfigurations, and broken authority and more. Azure WAF can be planted within minutes with Azure Application gateway, Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Azure front door. Microsoft on Friday said that it is announcing the general availability of the Web Application Firewall (WAF) bot protection feature on Application Gateway. 

The feature lets customers to control bot protection rule set for WAF to log requests or restrict them from known harmful IP addresses. "Roughly 20% of all Internet traffic comes from bad bots. They do things like scraping, scanning, and looking for vulnerabilities in your web application. When these bots are stopped at the Web Application Firewall (WAF), they can’t attack you. They also can’t use up your resources and services, such as your backends and other underlying infrastructure," reports Microsoft.

The new bot protection rule can be used with OWASP CRS (Core Rules Set) to give extra safety for web applications. Because of this new rule that blocks bad bots, criminals can usi ot for different malicious tasks which are resource consuming like scanning, scraping, and looking out for exploits in web apps. When the bot protection rule is implemented on Azure WAF via Application Gateway, bots that use known malicious IPs retrieved from Microsoft Threat Intelligence feed are get automatically restricted from accessing customer server resources or verifying them on potential vulnerability gaps. "The bot mitigation ruleset list of known bad IP addresses updates multiple times per day from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence feed to stay in sync with the bots," Microsoft said. 

"Your web applications are continuously protected even as the bot attack vectors change," reports Bleeping Computers. You can get more information on WAF on Microsoft's Azure Product Website. Bleeping Computers reports "the steps required to configure a bot protection rule set include: Creating a basic WAF policy for Application Gateway by following the instructions described in Create Web Application Firewall policies for Application Gateway. In the Basic policy page that you created previously, under Settings, select Rules. 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."