LAST UPDATED Sep 24, 2024
As technology evolves across industries, cyber threats grow in both frequency and sophistication, especially with attackers using automated tools to bypass traditional defenses in seconds. Manual efforts like inspecting traffic and updating firewall rules leave security teams falling behind rapidly evolving attacks. Automated threat protection is critical because it drastically reduces response times and minimizes risk exposure. Another major advantage of automated threat protection is the reduction in manual intervention, which saves security teams valuable time and resources. With traditional systems, teams often face an overwhelming volume of alerts from multiple sources, leading to alert fatigue—a common issue where important alerts can be overlooked due to the sheer number of notifications. Automated threat protection eliminates this burden by handling most of the threat detection and mitigation autonomously, allowing security professionals the time to focus on critical tasks, reduces stress, and ensures that potential threats are addressed.
That’s where ThreatX Protect steps in by offering an automated approach to API and application protection. ThreatX Protect leverages real-time visibility and behavior-based detection combined with automated protection to stop attacks before they impact an organization’s infrastructure performance or cause interruptions. By integrating automation, businesses can ensure not only faster threat protection, but also a more efficient and stress-free environment for their security teams.
Key Benefits of Automation with ThreatX:
- Real-time Visibility: By deploying as a reverse proxy, ThreatX Protect accurately identifies and visualizes legitimate and malicious traffic patterns instantly.
- Behavioral Threat Detection: ThreatX continuously analyzes traffic patterns and detects threats as they emerge, stopping malicious activity before it advances.
- Instant Response to Threats: Automated responses based on risk allows ThreatX to alert on, tarpit, or block malicious traffic instantly, preventing attacks from escalating.
Managing Threats
ThreatX Protect provides a detailed view of all identified threats. The platform’s decision engine correlates traffic data back to the origin or “attacker”, assigns a risk score to the attacker based on its behavior, and then automates responses based on the risk of malicious traffic. This enables security teams to prioritize responses based on the severity of the threat, ensuring that the most dangerous attacks are handled first.
ThreatX Protect provides a detailed view of all identified threats. The platform’s decision engine correlates traffic data back to the origin or “attacker”, assigns a risk score to the attacker based on its behavior, and then automates responses based on the risk of malicious traffic. This enables security teams to prioritize responses based on the severity of the threat, ensuring that the most dangerous attacks are handled first.
How ThreatX Tracks and Manages Threats:
- Behavioral Risk Scoring: Based on attacker behavior, ThreatX assigns risk scores, enabling the system to adjust its responses based on the threat level.
- Fingerprinting Attackers: ThreatX fingerprints every attacker, allowing it to track their behavior over time, even if they attempt to evade detection by changing IP addresses or rotating user agents.
- Business-logic Enforcement: ThreatX ensures that critical business services stay up and running by enforcing business logic rules. This feature protects against attacks that attempt to abuse the functioning of an application with excessive API calls or fraudulent transactions.
- Sensitive Data Exposure: Tracks API transactions involving sensitive data, such as PII, PCI, and authentication credentials, ensuring that high-risk APIs with sensitive data receive the boosted protection they need.
- Risk-based Blocking: Once an attacker’s risk score crosses a threshold, ThreatX Protect can be configured to automatically block them, ensuring threats are stopped before they can cause damage.
Escalating with Alerts
ThreatX can automatically trigger an alert to notify the security team. These alerts are fully customizable, ensuring that teams are immediately aware of high-risk situations without needing to manually monitor the system. This flexibility allows organizations to tailor their alerting system to focus on the most critical issues, reducing the risk of alert fatigue, which is common in environments that generate large volumes of low-priority notifications.
Additionally, ThreatX’s alerting system integrates with popular management tools, ensuring seamless escalation across platforms like email and Slack. This integration enables security teams to concentrate on their workflows, improving the speed of response and making it easier to manage threats as they develop. By integrating automated alerts, ThreatX ensures that security teams stay informed without being overwhelmed, helping them stay focused while maintaining visibility over evolving threats. In an environment where threats are constantly evolving, automated alerts enhance efficiency, reduce stress, and contribute to a more resilient defense system.
Traffic Rate Limiting
ThreatX also offers rate-limiting, designed to protect APIs and web applications from malicious behaviors such as excessive requests or brute force attacks. Rate limiting allows administrators to set specific thresholds on the number of requests that can be made by a user or IP within a given time frame. This is particularly useful in scenarios where bad entities attempt to overwhelm systems through DDoS attacks or abuse API endpoints.
By setting thresholds on API requests, ThreatX ensures that legitimate users can access services without being affected by malicious actors making excessive calls. This is particularly critical for APIs that handle sensitive data like authentication credentials or financial information. Additionally, ThreatX’s advanced rate-limiting capabilities allow it to monitor API traffic in real time, adjusting thresholds based on the behavior of users or entities. Rate limiting in ThreatX is part of a broader range of defenses that include behavioral risk scoring, fingerprinting of attackers, and business-logic enforcement. Together, these features provide layered protection, reducing the risk of critical systems being overwhelmed by malicious activity.
Risk Based Blocking
One of the most powerful features of ThreatX’s automated threat protection is its risk-based blocking, which instantly stops threats without requiring manual intervention. ThreatX tracks and scores each attacker’s behavior over time, ensuring that the most dangerous threats are automatically stopped and eventually, added to a permanently blocked list. ThreatX Protect uses a three-strike system by automatically blocking threats to prevent false positives:
- First Strike: When ThreatX detects malicious activity, it blocks the attacker’s traffic for 30 minutes. This temporary block gives the attacker a chance to resume normal behavior if the action was a false positive.
- Second Strike: If the attacker persists and triggers another security event, they are blocked for another 30 minutes. During this time, ThreatX continues monitoring for further malicious behavior.
- After Third Strike: After a third strike, ThreatX automatically adds the attacker to a permanent blocklist, stopping any traffic from reaching the APIs or applications that ThreatX is protecting.
This automated system prevents repeated attacks and ensures false positives are quickly resolved.
In an era where cyber threats are advancing at breakneck speed, staying ahead requires more than just traditional defenses—it requires automation. ThreatX Protect empowers organizations with the ability to detect, analyze, and respond to threats instantly, all while reducing the manual effort required from security teams. By leveraging advanced features like automated threat protection, ThreatX Protect ensures that your APIs and applications are protected from the most sophisticated attacks 24/7 – without any manual intervention required. ThreatX Protect allows organizations to eliminate threats without compromising your team or peace of mind, knowing their most critical assets are secure with automated threat protection.