AI enables attackers to automate and adapt attacks against web applications. Meeting that challenge requires effective use of your security controls: stronger detection, appropriate prevention rules, and readiness to respond.
SHIELD UP! is WAFScan’s methodology for assessing your current protection, strengthening your WAF policy, and preparing your team for attacks.
Why SHIELD UP?
Web applications are complex. The attacks targeting them are diverse, and WAFs offer many features, rules, and configuration options. Effective protection depends on how those capabilities are applied to your application.
A deployed WAF is the starting point. Understanding what it blocks, what it misses, and how your team responds is what turns it into effective protection.
Assess Your Protection
Security Control Assessment — SCA
Understand how your WAF behaves when tested from the web.
WAFScan combines external testing with a review of relevant security settings to evaluate the protection delivered by your current policy.
- Test blocking behavior across attack vectors and application entry points.
- Identify coverage gaps and limitations in vendor defaults.
- Review detection mechanisms and prevention rules.
- Use consistent test scenarios to support comparison and repeat assessments.
You receive findings by attack vector, technical details for rule improvements, and guidance on policy priorities.
What this means for you: a clear view of your current WAF protection and where it needs attention.
Strengthen Detection and Prevention
Make Better Use of Your WAF
Use the assessment findings to improve your policy and apply more of your WAF’s capabilities.
This phase considers:
- Detection and prevention rule improvements.
- Positive security: defining permitted application behavior.
- Site Access Policy — SAP: defining appropriate access to your application.
- Mitigation strategies and defense in depth.
- A mitigation profile that documents how identified attack scenarios should be handled.
Changes are tested again to validate their effect and check for disruption to legitimate traffic.
What this means for you: stronger protection, with policy decisions grounded in observed behavior.
Prepare for Incident Response
Incident Response Readiness — IRR
When your WAF detects an attack, your team needs to understand the evidence and act on it.
We use attack simulation scenarios to trace what happens from the incoming request through detection, logging, alerting, and response.
- Where does the attack appear in your logs?
- What does the event look like, and what does it mean?
- Does it generate an actionable alert?
- How can your team recognize that the application is under attack?
- Which mitigation profile and response steps should apply?
This phase connects WAF security engineers with your incident response team or CSIRT, using the AMI3A framework to structure the process.
What this means for you: clearer attack visibility and a team better prepared to respond.
Get Your WAF SHIELD UP!
Assess protection. Strengthen detection. Prepare to respond.
Know what your WAF can stop, improve the policy behind it, and make sure your team can act when attacks arrive.
Contact WAFScan to assess your WAF and put SHIELD UP! into practice.