CHARACTERIZATION OF ILLEGITIMATE WEB TRANSACTIONS

A device and method for configuring a web application firewall (WAF) based on characterization of web attacks are provided. The method includes receiving a plurality of hypertext transfer protocol transactions (HTTP) entities; tokenizing the received plurality of HTTP entities based on at least one delimiter; analyzing statistical distribution of each of the at least one delimiter in the tokenized HTTP entities; training a model based on an analysis of the tokenized HTTP entities, when a sufficient number of HTTP entities have been analyzed; and configuring, based on the trained model, the WAF with at least one detection rule to detect at least malicious HTTP transactions.