A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is Not the Way to Deal With the Reoccurrence of a Hack of a Website

These days quite a bit of our business dealing with the cleanup of hacked websites is re-cleaning websites after other security companies didn’t clean them up properly before us. Troublingly we recently noticed a company that offers to clean up websites, ASTRA Security, treating that as a normal result and using it to promote using web application firewall (WAF), which they also sell:

Even after clean up and restoring your site, the Magento admin hack may reoccur. The reasons could be a backdoor left by the attacker or simply a vulnerability that may be left unpatched. To avoid such scenarios it is highly recommended to use a WAF or security solution of some sort.

If there is still a backdoor on the website that means it hasn’t been cleaned up, since that would be something would be removed during the cleanup, which someone cleaning up hacked websites should understand.

Part of a proper cleanup is trying to figure out how the website was hacked, so if a vulnerability is left unpatched then things probably have not been done right either.

The providers of WAF’s don’t provide evidence that they provide effective protection against vulnerabilities, while we have seen plenty of evidence that they don’t provide it. It would be even more difficult for them to protect against exploitation of backdoors due to wide variety of their location and what is done through them, which someone cleaning up hacked websites should also understand.

The best way to handle a reoccurrence is to avoid one in the first place by hiring someone like us that will properly clean up the website. If you didn’t do that then the next best solution is to hire someone to re-clean it that will do things properly.

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