Virtual Patching is a policy for a web application firewall (in this case ModSecurity) that is able to identify attempts to exploit a specific Website vulnerability. ModSecurity analyzes transactions and intercepts attacks in transit, so malicious traffic never reaches the target Website. The end result is that even if a vulnerability still exists within the application’s source code, the virtual patch will protect against clients attempting to exploit it.

Virtual Patching is an extremely valuable technique that can be used to provide immediate protection against identified vulnerabilities. The trick here, however, is that you first must identify them! You can’t really create a patch if you don’t know what the problem is.

At the Web Security blog.

[ Read more ]