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Let me secure that for you!

How to use Virtual Patching to protect your site

What is lmstfu?

“Let me secure that for you!” is a reference architecture that demonstrates the virtual patching approach using open source tools and configuration examples.

Diagram showing the components of lmstfu sitting between a User and a Server: a WAF component running modsecurity with the OWASP Core Rule Set, and behind it a node.js proxy that stores state in redis

Sitting between the user and the web server, two proxy layers receive and forward requests to the server, and then return responses to the user.

The first layer is the ModSecurity web application firewall running inside Apache http server. This is an open source module that allows rules to be configured to block, modify or otherwise inspect web traffic.

Out of the box, ModSecurity doesn’t do much - it needs rules to be configured to unleash it’s power. The OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set is a set of attack detection rules that have been collated and tuned by experts.

Read more about ModSecurity and how we use it

The second layer is a node.js proxy built on the Redbird reverse proxy node.js package. This extends node-js-proxy with extra features.

node.js allows us to perform additional logic to address the vulnerabilities or weaknesses that can’t be fixed in ModSecurity.

Read more about node.js and how we use it