Wargaming Case Study

Appsec data that makes the difference

Wargaming is an award-winning online game developer and publisher headquartered in Nicosia, Cyprus. Operating since 1998, Wargaming has grown to become one of he leaders in the gaming industry with 5,500 employees and offices spread all over the world. Over 200 million players enjoy Wargaming’s titles across all major gaming platforms. Their flagship products include the massively popular free-to-play hit World of Tanks and the strategic naval action game World of Warships.

• ‍20 years of game development experience
• ‍15+ released titles gaining millions of fans worldwide
• ‍5500 employees over 18 global offices
• ‍200M over last 10 years – larges global gaming audience
• Datacenters by G-Core

Why Wallarm?

In 2015 Wargaming participated in Wallarm WAF and API security Beta testing. When the testing period was finished, Wargaming became one of the first enterprise commercial clients of Wallarm.

After some years of using the platform, Wargaming conducted a competitive comparison. The result was that appliance-based WAF solutions were less expensive, but not suitable for Wargaming due to the business model and infrastructure construction with more than 50 regions of operation.

On the other hand, there was no convenient way to change the WAF service partner, since all deploys, plants were tightly connected to NGINX. Moreover, for the amount of traffic Wargaming resources get – other service partners, for example, Cloudflare, cost incomparably more than Wallarm. Nevertheless, competitive analysis of WAF and API security market is conducted each year.

What is under Wallarm protection?

First of all, due to GDPR, the personal data of the customers and gamers may cost the company a lot. So, almost every node with traffic is protected by Wallarm. Wargaming has about 3000 nodes with web-applications. Wallarm protects websites, APIs, and applications – big gaming services, catalogs, shops. In different services, and teams, multiple APIs and different standards are used.

Deployment

Wargaming uses a hybrid mode of API protection: some of the nodes operate in blocking mode, others only in monitoring mode.

Most useful features of Wallarm for Wargaming:

• Statistics in dashboards. Wallarm gives stat on the aggressiveness of the internet. These statistics are used for internal forecasts and help predict web-associated activities, highs, and downs to distribute resources in a more efficient way.

• Active Security Testing (Scanner). Immediate internal scanning of such a number of resources is not a trivial task. Furthermore, a quick analysis of this load of raw data is almost impossible. Wallarm analyses the load of data and indicates only the vulnerabilities that need attention. Active scanner informs about, for example, the expiration of PHPs and alerts about open ports. Detected vulnerabilities are being fixed. This is a kind of insurance for Wargaming infrastructure.