Stopping Bad Bots Without Blocking the Good Ones

In an era where automation pervades digital interactions, distinguishing between beneficial and malicious automated traffic is critical for maintaining security without disrupting operations. Fastly's Next-Gen Web Application Firewall (WAF) addresses this challenge by offering signal exclusion rules, which prevent specific automated requests from being mistakenly flagged as threats. These rules enable businesses to continue using trusted internal tools and third-party integrations without triggering false positives, which can lead to service interruptions and data errors. By using unique HTTP headers or carefully managed IP addresses to identify legitimate automation, organizations can apply these exclusion rules effectively, ensuring that beneficial bot traffic is not impeded, while still maintaining comprehensive protection against actual threats. This granularity helps maintain robust security by allowing other WAF rules to remain active, protecting against common exploits such as SQL Injection or Command Execution, even when trusted sources become compromised.