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by ppierald 946 days ago
A few points.

PCI-DSS does not mandate the use of a WAF. It is one of two ways you can fulfill requirement 6.5 or 6.6. WAF + OWASP Top Ten ruleset is typically easier to get evidence for your auditor, but you can show that continuous scanning using a DAST scanning engine to meet requirements.

I would have a WAF installed with very few highly tuned rules against mostly SQLi. Why? Because the damage of letting that through and praying that the developer or web-app framework does it right are significant. The rules for SQLi are pretty easy to get right and dropping that traffic before it gets to your web server is a reasonable thing.

I would have a WAF installed with no rules too. It is nice to have something there where you can drop in a Log4J rule and get protection relatively quickly for attacks of that nature. There have been a number of these over the years and a small performance penalty seems worth the big picture safety net.

I am against the pricey models that the cloud vendors push. WAF can get expensive. They typically are bundled with other cloud services, but hey, if you've gotten that far, you are probably outsourcing most things to the cloud provider anyway.

I do not like WAF pragmatically because it lets the developer off the hook in many ways. There is something there doing their work for them and another reason for some developers to not understand or care about the security of their applications. Something else will do it for me whether I know this or not.