Bot protection rule set is enabled and assigned in Azure Front Door WAF

Overview

Azure Front Door is a global, scalable entry point that uses the Microsoft global edge network to deliver fast, secure, and highly scalable web applications. Web Application Firewall (WAF) integrated with Azure Front Door provides protection against common web exploits and vulnerabilities at the network edge. The Bot Manager rule set is a managed rule set available exclusively in Azure Front Door Premium SKU that provides protection against malicious bots while allowing legitimate bots such as search engine crawlers to access your applications. When bot protection is not enabled, threat actors can deploy automated attacks against web applications including credential stuffing attacks that test stolen username/password combinations at scale, web scraping that extracts sensitive data or intellectual property, inventory hoarding bots that deplete product availability, and application-layer DDoS attacks that exhaust backend resources. The Bot Manager rule set categorizes bots into good bots, bad bots, and unknown bots, allowing security teams to configure appropriate actions for each category. Bad bots can be blocked or challenged with CAPTCHA, while good bots like Googlebot and Bingbot are allowed through. Without bot protection, organizations lack visibility into bot traffic patterns and cannot distinguish between human users and automated clients, making it impossible to defend against sophisticated bot-driven attacks that bypass traditional rate limiting and IP-based controls.

Remediation

Upgrade to Azure Front Door Premium if currently using Standard SKU to access bot protection features

• Azure Front Door tier comparison

Create a WAF policy with Premium SKU if one does not exist

• Create a WAF policy for Azure Front Door using the Azure portal

Enable the Bot Manager rule set in the WAF policy

• Configure bot protection for Web Application Firewall

Associate the WAF policy with your Azure Front Door profile via security policies

• Add security policy in Azure Front Door

Configure bot protection rules to customize actions for different bot categories

• Bot protection rule set on Azure Front Door

Monitor bot traffic using Azure Front Door logs and metrics

• Monitor metrics and logs in Azure Front Door

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_Front_Door_Premium
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.