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601 points scalewithlee | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.244s | source
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matt_heimer ◴[] No.43794013[source]
The people configuring WAF rules at CDNs tend to do a poor job understanding sites and services that discuss technical content. It's not just Cloudflare, Akamai has the same problem.

If your site discusses databases then turning on the default SQL injection attack prevention rules will break your site. And there is another ruleset for file inclusion where things like /etc/hosts and /etc/passwd get blocked.

I disagree with other posts here, it is partially a balance between security and usability. You never know what service was implemented with possible security exploits and being able to throw every WAF rule on top of your service does keep it more secure. Its just that those same rulesets are super annoying when you have a securely implemented service which needs to discuss technical concepts.

Fine tuning the rules is time consuming. You often have to just completely turn off the ruleset because when you try to keep the ruleset on and allow the use-case there are a ton of changes you need to get implemented (if its even possible). Page won't load because /etc/hosts was in a query param? Okay, now that you've fixed that, all the XHR included resources won't load because /etc/hosts is included in the referrer. Now that that's fixed things still won't work because some random JS analytics lib put the URL visited in a cookie, etc, etc... There is a temptation to just turn the rules off.

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1. julik ◴[] No.43798420[source]
This is what surprises me in this story. I could not, at first glance, assume that either Substack people or Cloudflare people were incompetent.

Oh: I resisted tooth and nail about turning on a WAF at one of my gigs (there was no strict requirement for it, just cargo cult). Turns out - I was right.