AXIOMIO

B2B SaaS · Sharpsell

Sharpsell Puts Every Request Behind AWS WAF

Sharpsell.ai is an AI-powered, mobile-first sales enablement and readiness platform designed specifically for frontline and field sales forces. It operates as a B2B SaaS solution that transforms complex product data into interactive sales playbooks, dynamic pitches, and personalized customer presentations on the spot. By integrating conversational AI, the platform provides automated role-playing and real-time coaching, allowing sales reps to practice pitches and handle objections effectively before meeting clients.

Results at a Glance

  • 90%+ Credential Attacks Cut
  • 80%+ Scraping Reduced
  • 100% Apps Behind WAF
  • <15 min Findings to Security Hub

The Challenge

Sharpsell's internet-facing web and mobile applications and APIs were experiencing sustained attacks. These included credential stuffing and brute-force attempts against authentication endpoints, automated scraping of customer sales content, and bursts of abusive API traffic. These attacks increased the risk of unauthorized account access, consumed application capacity, and threatened the availability of customer-facing services.

The existing security controls were insufficient to mitigate the attacks. Web application protection was inconsistent across applications and between the production and staging environments, rate limiting was not implemented on critical endpoints, and security events were not centrally monitored. As a result, the security team had limited visibility into attack patterns, making it difficult to identify targeted applications, respond to emerging threats, or consistently enforce protection across the environment.

Sharpsell engaged AxiomIO to implement a centralized application protection platform that stopped web application attacks before they reached the application, enforced consistent security policies across all internet-facing applications, and provided centralized visibility into security events for continuous monitoring and response.

Our Solution

AxiomIO implemented a centralized web application protection architecture with AWS WAF as the security edge. Web ACLs protect both the Application Load Balancer in front of the application tier and the Amazon CloudFront distribution that serves static assets. All inbound traffic, dynamic and static, is inspected before it reaches the application, so malicious requests are blocked while legitimate users continue uninterrupted.

The solution combined AWS WAF managed rule groups, AxiomIO-developed custom rules and rate-based rules with an AWS-native security analytics pipeline. AWS WAF events are collected automatically, normalized and imported into AWS Security Hub, and indexed into Amazon OpenSearch Service dashboards. This gives the Security Operations Centre (SOC) centralized visibility across all protected applications.

The entire solution was deployed using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), with production and staging deployed from the same template. That gives consistent security controls, repeatable application onboarding and standardized operational processes across Sharpsell's application portfolio.

Results

The solution established a standardized web application protection capability across Sharpsell's internet-facing environment, significantly improving resilience against external attacks and providing consistent operational visibility.

Key outcomes included:

  • Centralized protection for all internet-facing applications through a common AWS WAF security architecture.
  • Automated mitigation of credential stuffing, brute-force attempts, scraping and common web application attacks before traffic reached the application tier.
  • Consistent WAF policy enforcement and rate limiting across all protected applications, in production and staging.
  • Centralized monitoring of web application attacks through Amazon OpenSearch and AWS Security Hub.
  • Automated alerting and security event correlation that improved SOC response and investigation capabilities.
  • Repeatable onboarding of new applications using Infrastructure as Code, eliminating configuration drift and reducing operational overhead.
  • Version-controlled WAF policy management, with every new rule validated in Count mode before it blocks traffic.