New Web Application Firewall Adds Another Layer of Protection

Make no mistake, we’re as secure as we always have been. We’ve just added a layer of protection from outages called a Web Application Firewall (WAF). It’s an additional set of tools that our engineering team uses to monitor and block unwanted traffic. Since March 2020, overall traffic has increased 250% with no signs of decreasing. With all that attention on our sites, more help is welcome to proactively prevent outages.

We first added the WAF to a few small sites to test. Once that was successful, we applied it to all GovHub sites earlier this month. But we’re not done yet! We’ll continue to be vigilant by tuning the rules to guard against potential bot attacks and to ensure stability and speed for real visitors.

For the most part, you won’t notice this behind-the-scenes improvement on a daily basis. You may occasionally receive a request to verify that you’re human when you’re logged in to update to your site. If you encounter this verification often or have any other issues, please let us know by submitting a support request.

Related to: 

• GovHub
• CMS