What it does not do
Blackwall inspects the requests sent to your website and stops the ones that look like common attacks. That is worth having, and it is one layer. It is not a promise that a site is safe, and it does not do the things below.
- Large floods of traffic (DDoS)
- Blackwall inspects requests. It does not have the network capacity to absorb an attack meant to overwhelm a site by sheer volume.
- Telling people from bots
- A bot that behaves like a visitor and sends ordinary requests is let through like one.
- Stolen passwords
- Someone signing in with a real user name and password looks like that user.
- Who may do what inside your site
- If your site lets a signed-in customer open another customer's order, that request is an ordinary one and it passes.
- Finding weaknesses
- Blackwall stops attacks as they arrive. It does not examine your site for what is wrong with it.
- Anything on the server or on computers
- Nothing is installed anywhere. Malware already on the server, or on a staff computer, is out of its sight.
- Traffic inside a live connection
- A WebSocket's opening request is inspected. The messages that follow inside it are not.
- Very large uploads, past the first megabyte
- The first megabyte of a request is inspected. The rest of a large upload is passed on unread.
What it can get wrong
- It can stop a real visitor. Rules that catch attacks sometimes catch ordinary text that looks like one. That is why it starts by watching, and why a wrong block is fixed with one button.
- It can miss an attack. A new or unusual one may match no rule. A firewall lowers the odds; it does not replace keeping your site's own software up to date.
- It can be skipped. Until your server is locked to Blackwall, anyone who knows the server's own address can go around it. The app shows how to lock it and checks that you have.
- It is one more thing between your visitors and your site. If Blackwall is unreachable, so is your site, until your DNS is pointed back. Leaving says how.
To find out what is wrong with a website, as opposed to stopping attacks on it, STRATIC makes Sentinel.