WAF Malware Attack Protection for Mac OS X was designed to protect one site against many attacks. It works by establishing a connection between your Web browser and the server, which are on a secure Internet-connected network (that would be protected by a firewall). When you visit this web site, it requests a listing of sites that are on the blacklist. When you are allowed to visit these sites, the software checks the "urls" field in the browser to determine whether or not it should automatically open the site based on the settings in the "uri" field.
If you visit a site in the future that is not on the blacklist, your computer will prompt you to allow access. The software does a security check using curl and a variety of other protocols on the URL. If it finds an issue, it returns a "non-matching" code which essentially means that the website doesn't support curl. If you have used curl to perform your web application checks, then the security check won't match and you'll get a message. You can then either deny access or modify the existing security policy to allow access to the requested web application.
Let's talk about how a web application firewall works in more detail. There is a web application firewall that is set up to block malicious software from accessing your system. In general, the "host" system that the software is installed on will be the same as the one where the malware was identified. However, it's often possible for a malicious program to change its host in an effort to evade detection and blockage. To avoid having to deal with this kind of issue, you should scan your system regularly with a virus scanner and anti-malware tool. A WAF tool is especially useful for this purpose.
As previously mentioned, there is a feature within this type of firewall that allows you to allow or deny certain classes of files, depending upon whether you trust that server or not. This is great when you have particular files that you need to have access to (such as passwords, financial information, etc.) Most firewalls will allow you to make these determinations using a list of known "infected" directories. It's very important that you only allow directory scanning while you're actually running the scanning process, because otherwise you may accidentally allow attackers to gain access to important data.
A "proactively secure" option in a WAF is another feature that allows you to have a little bit of additional protection for your system while still being able to perform a malware scan on a regular basis. A "proactively secure" option will allow you to choose specific files or websites that are scanned during your malware scan and will show up with a message whenever any of those items are found. You can then choose to allow the file or website to run during your free daily malware scan, or just to have the associated information appear during that time as well. This feature can save you time when you're trying to identify specific threats that you can more easily identify, but you'll need to activate it in the first place if you want to take advantage of it.
Many people think that the best way to remove malware from a computer is to wait until after the hackers have done some damage, and then perform a massive malware scan to find all the infections. Unfortunately, most hackers use multiple techniques to try to get past even the most heavily protected anti-malware software, and by the time they're finished, they'll usually have completely destroyed your operating system. The best way to insure that hackers won't be able to do this to you is to perform a daily malware scan in addition to a regular malware removal routine so that you can identify and eliminate any threats before they can do a lot of damage.
A final WAF option for performing malware prevention is to implement "blacklist monitoring". Many WAF providers will allow you to add a custom blacklist to your PC that will prevent certain files and processes from being run. By using a special list of files and processes that you want to avoid, you can ensure that Windows will only load the files and programs that are on your list and will thereby improve the performance of your PC. Some WAF tools even allow you to manually add or remove software from this list, which can be used for additional prevention and repair.
If you use a good malware removal tool and a good anti-malware program that have a blacklist monitoring function as well as a comprehensive removal utility, you should be able to prevent most threats with an effective anti-malware software and a good PC performance optimization strategy. However, if you don't have these things in place, it's still very important that you perform a quick and easy scan with a high quality scanner every day and an aggressive malware removal technique. After an hour of operation with these scans, you can expect to see a large percentage of traces and other problems being cleaned away. So don't neglect your PC security, keep it updated with the latest anti-malware and PC performance optimization software and perform frequent scans for maximum performance! You will never know when a new vulnerability is going to appear... and when you need to make the most out of your PC performance!
