[sebazzz]

Oh man, web application firewalls and especially Azure Application Gateway are the bane of my existence. Where I work they literally slap an Azure Application Gateway instance on every app service with all rules enabled (even the ones Microsofts recommends not to enable) in block mode directly when provisioning the stuff in Azure. The app is never observed in audit mode.

Result is that random stuff in the application does not work for any user, or only for some users, because some obscure rule in Azure Application Gateway triggers. Especially the SQL injection rule of Azure Application Gateway seems to misfire very often. A true pain to debug, then a true pain for the process to get the particular rule disabled.

And then not even to start about the monthly costs. Often Azure Application Gateway itself is more expensive than the App Service + SQL Database + Blob Storage + opt. App Insights. I really think someone in the company got offered a private island from Microsoft for putting Azure Application Gateway as a mandatory piece in the infrastructure of every app.

Yes, our most of our security has been outsourced to cheap workers in developing countries like India, which are of course rated on maintaining the standard and not rated on thinking and understanding what you want and putting things in context, and probably also work 60-70 hours per week during ungodly times so you can hardly blame them. It is truly the process that is broken.

[vrighter]

Well what if they were intelligent and could actually really understand the data and its schema before deciding whether to allow or reject the request... wait... that's just the application itself.

[jiggawatts]

It all boils down to trust. Management don’t trust the developers to do the right thing because they outsourced development to the lowest bidder. They futilely compensate for this by spending a mere $500/mo for a WAF.

MBA thinking at its finest…