Bot protection ruleset is enabled and assigned in Application Gateway WAF

Overview

Azure Application Gateway Web Application Firewall (WAF) provides bot protection through the Microsoft Bot Manager ruleset, which identifies and categorizes automated traffic based on behavioral patterns, known bot signatures, and IP reputation. Without bot protection enabled, threat actors leverage automated tools to perform large-scale attacks that would be impractical manually: credential stuffing attacks that test stolen username and password combinations across login endpoints at thousands of attempts per minute, content scraping that extracts proprietary data and pricing information for competitive exploitation, inventory hoarding bots that deplete product availability for legitimate customers, and application-layer denial of service attacks that overwhelm backend resources. These automated attacks often originate from distributed botnets that rotate IP addresses to evade simple rate limiting, making signature-based bot detection essential. The Bot Manager ruleset classifies bots into categories including known good bots (search engines), known bad bots (scrapers, spammers), and unknown bots, allowing granular policy enforcement. Without this classification, malicious bot traffic blends with legitimate requests, consuming application resources and enabling fraud that damages revenue and customer trust.

Remediation

• What is Azure Web Application Firewall on Azure Application Gateway? - Overview of WAF capabilities on Application Gateway including bot protection
• Configure bot protection for Web Application Firewall on Azure Application Gateway - Step-by-step guidance on enabling and configuring bot protection
• Web Application Firewall bot protection overview - Detailed documentation of bot categories and detection capabilities

Run it

The check runs as part of the whole assessment, with the ZeroTrustAssessment module installed:

Install-Module ZeroTrustAssessment -Scope CurrentUser
Connect-Maester
Invoke-Maester -Pack ZTA -SkipBuiltIn

Leave out -SkipBuiltIn to run Maester’s own checks in the same run.

About this check

Severity	High
Effort to fix	Low
Impact on users	Low
Pillar	Network
Category	Azure Network Security
Product	Azure
Feature	Network security
Area	Infrastructure hardening
ATT&CK	T1110.004 Credential Stuffing, T1499.003 Application Exhaustion Flood
Licence	Azure WAF
Tenant	Workforce

Product, feature, area and ATT&CK are Maester’s: the assessment does not record them, so Maester keeps them in the pack’s taxonomy.json.

A Microsoft check, part of the Zero Trust Assessment pack. Text from ZeroTrustAssessment 3.1.0, © Microsoft, MIT licence.