Detects and stops malicious distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other types of malicious attacks before they reach your servers, preventing them from affecting network and application performance. The NetScaler appliance identifies legitimate clients and elevates their priority, leaving suspect clients unable to consume a disproportionate percentage of resources and cripple your site. The appliance provides application-level protection from the following types of malicious attacks:

The appliance aggressively defends against these types of attacks by preventing the allocation of server resources for these connections. This insulates servers from the overwhelming flood of packets associated with these events.

The appliance also protects network resources from ICMP based attacks by using ICMP rate limiting and aggressive ICMP packet inspection. It performs strong IP reassembly, drops a variety of suspicious and malformed packets, and applies Access Control Lists (ACLs) to site traffic for further protection.

For more information, see AppQoE.

Provides protection from malicious attacks for websites at the Layer 7 level. The appliance inspects each incoming request according to user-configured rules based on HTTP headers, and performs the action the user configured. Actions can include resetting the connection, dropping the request, or sending an error message to the user’s browser. This allows the appliance to screen unwanted requests and reduces your servers’ exposure to attacks.

This feature can also analyze HTTP GET and POST requests and filter out known bad signatures, allowing it to defend your servers against HTTP-based attacks.

Functions like an advanced filter and can be used to generate responses from the appliance to the client. Some common uses of this feature are generation of redirect responses, user-defined responses, and resets.

For more information, see Responder.

Modifies HTTP headers and body text. You can use the rewrite feature to add HTTP headers to an HTTP request or response, modify individual HTTP headers, or delete HTTP headers. It also enables you to modify the HTTP body in requests and responses.

When the appliance receives a request or sends a response, it checks for rewrite rules, and if applicable rules exist, it applies them to the request or response before passing it on to the web server or client computer.

For more information, see Rewrite.

Regulates the flow of user requests to servers and controls the number of users that can simultaneously access the resources on the servers, queuing any additional requests once your servers have reached their capacity. By controlling the rate at which connections can be established, the appliance blocks surges in requests from being passed on to your servers, thus preventing site overload.

For more information, see Surge Protection.

NetScaler Gateway is a secure application access solution that provides administrators granular application-level policy and action controls to secure access to applications and data while allowing users to work from anywhere. It gives IT administrators a single point of control and tools to help ensure compliance with regulations and the highest levels of information security across and outside the enterprise. At the same time, it empowers users with a single point of access—optimized for roles, devices, and networks—to the enterprise applications and data they need. This unique combination of capabilities helps maximize the productivity of today's mobile workforce.

For more information, see NetScaler Gateway.

Protects applications from misuse by hackers and malware, such as cross site scripting attacks, buffer overflow attacks, SQL injection attacks, and forceful browsing, by filtering traffic between each protected web server and users that connect to any website on that web server. The application firewall examines all traffic for evidence of attacks on web server security or misuse of web server resources, and takes the appropriate action to prevent these attacks from succeeding.

For more information, see Application Firewall.

IP reputation is an essential tool for identifying IP addresses that generate unwanted requests. By using an IP reputation list, you can effectively reject requests from addresses known to have a negative reputation. This approach not only enhances the performance of the Web Application Firewall by streamlining the filtering process but also ensures that only genuine requests are processed. Also, it is possible to reset or drop unwanted requests or implement a responder policy to take specific actions based on the identified reputation of the requesting IP address.

For more information, see IP Reputation.