Madison Genthry 
Cyber threats have always been there. There was never really a heyday of the internet when you could run around freely in a digital utopia, where everyone behaved and nobody wanted anything that was incongruent with what anybody else wanted. Unfortunately, where there are many humans, you need security in place to ensure people don’t get hurt, robbed, or exploited.
And, unfortunately, where there are many bots, you need extra security in place to make sure, again, that people don’t get hurt, robbed, or exploited.
Manual WAF and CDN management once felt like a fact of life for security teams. It’s manual and always ongoing, but it’s the best way to keep up with evolving threats and ensure that the gaps don’t start to form around your site or system. The trouble is, teams are usually spread thin, and edge security typically looks like a patchwork of different rules, different logging formats and different rule languages. It’s hard, time-consuming, and unfeasible to check across several consoles to make sure that a rule is followed everywhere. The question, ‘is your network edge safe?’ rarely has a straightforward answer, but that’s what it needs.
The Attack Timeline is Shrinking Too Fast to Keep Up With
We’re all aware that AI is getting better day by day, and that, while it’s being deployed for good, there are also plenty of people taking advantage of its unique traits in order to wage war against sites who are currently scrambling to keep up with its evolution. An attack timeline used to span days between the moment a vulnerability was disclosed, and the point of execution. Now, even a highly sophisticated attack against a vulnerability can be achieved in a matter of hours.
The human handoffs between reconnaissance and targeting, or exploitation and evasion don’t need to exist anymore. That’s most of the latency gone, and barely any human intervention needed.
Discovering and repairing gaps in edge security manually is no longer a viable method against these attacks. Bots are being deployed for reconnaissance, and they could already be at the point of exploitation while, on the side of the defence, human handoffs are still happening in the background.
What’s the Solution?
In this scenario, fighting fire with fire is the only way to stay on top. If bots are constantly acting against your site, looking for vulnerabilities that can be exploited faster than they can be repaired, then constant monitoring and continuous assessment are the only solutions.
A single management layer is essential, too. Policy changes need to happen across the board at the same moment, rather than being manually replicated on an as-and-when basis. There needs to be a culture shift from the team running a collection of fragmented manual tasks, toward a continuous Assess > Recommend > Orchestrate loop that runs like clockwork. That’s how the threat on the other side of the wall is operating, and we can’t hope to keep pace if we’re sticking with the old ways of doing things. Bows and arrows were once effective, but there are tanks on the battlefield now.
