CDN Web Application Firewall & Bot Management Flashcards

Which bot management technique uses machine learning to distinguish human visitors from automated bots based on behavioral signals?

Answer: Behavioral analytics and fingerprinting

Behavioral analytics analyzes mouse movements, keystroke cadence, and request patterns to distinguish bots from humans without friction for real users.

A company wants to allow Googlebot to crawl their CDN-protected site while blocking all other bots. What is the recommended approach?

Answer: Use IP allowlisting for Google's published crawler IP ranges combined with user-agent verification

Verifying Googlebot requires matching its declared user-agent against Google's published IP ranges via reverse DNS lookup, since user-agent alone can be spoofed.

What is credential stuffing, and which CDN bot management feature is specifically designed to detect it?

Answer: Using leaked username/password pairs against login endpoints; high-velocity login attempt detection

Credential stuffing automates login attempts with breached credentials, and CDN bot management detects it by flagging abnormal login request velocity from distributed IPs.

Which HTTP response code should a CDN WAF return when it blocks a request matched by a security rule?

Answer: 403 Forbidden

403 Forbidden is the standard response indicating the server understood the request but refuses to authorize it, which is appropriate for WAF-blocked requests.

What is 'scraping' in the context of CDN bot management, and why is it a concern?

Answer: Automated extraction of website content, pricing, or data by bots, consuming bandwidth and exposing proprietary data

Content scraping bots systematically harvest data, increasing origin load and potentially leaking competitive or proprietary information.

A WAF rule uses a regex pattern to match request bodies. What performance risk must operators consider at CDN scale?

Answer: ReDoS (Regular Expression Denial of Service) due to catastrophic backtracking on complex patterns

Poorly crafted regex patterns can trigger catastrophic backtracking, consuming excessive CPU per request and degrading WAF performance at high traffic volumes.