(I’m in the anti-WAF camp) That does stand to improve your posture by giving you the ability to quickly apply duct tape to mitigate an active mild denial of service attack. It’s not utterly useless.
Denial of service prevention and throttling of heavy users is a fine use, searching for a list of certain byte strings inside input fields and denying requests that contain them isn't.
Doesn't it also add latency to every request?
I think the main point is the WAF companies must have lobbied to get that into the checklist
the main point is you need to pay a third party
You can call your existing reverse proxy a WAF to check this checklist item. (Your point still stands, on the median companies may opt to purchase a WAF for various reasons.)
So does running McAfee on every POST body but some places really wanna do that regardless. (I at least hope the scanner isn't running in the kernel for this one).
Yeah, we were asked to do this at my last job by some sort of security review. This one doesn't bother me as much. "Display 'network error' whenever a user uploads a file containing 'SELECT *'" is a bad user experience. "Some files in this repository have been flagged as containing a virus and are not visible in the web interface until allowed by an administrator," is OK with me, though.