The September 2026 release of Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service delivers meaningful improvements across application protection, certificate management, operational visibility, and everyday administration.

These enhancements help security teams better understand emerging traffic, simplify critical workflows, and investigate operational issues more efficiently.

What’s new

🤖 Greater visibility and control for AI crawler traffic

A dedicated AI crawler experience provides clearer insight into how recognised AI crawlers interact with protected applications.

Benefits

• Monitor crawler requests, traffic trends, bandwidth consumption, and recent activity

• Understand activity by crawler and associated company

• Allow or block individual crawlers based on business requirements

• Manage related crawlers together at the crawler-family level

• Benefit from updated crawler definitions as the AI ecosystem evolves

The new experience is available from Bot Protection > AI Crawlers.

We will publish - dedicated article on AI crawler here and in Campus documentation.

🔐 Simpler certificate lifecycle management

Expanded certificate capabilities provide clearer information across certificate activation, validation, and troubleshooting workflows.

Benefits

• Greater flexibility through expanded certificate authority support

• Clearer activation and validation information

• Better visibility into certificate provider responses

• Faster diagnosis of issuance and challenge-verification failures

• More actionable certificate lifecycle events

🔎 Faster operational investigation

Improvements across logs, events, exports, dashboards, and reports help administrators find relevant information and diagnose issues more efficiently.

Benefits

• More predictable log filtering with an explicit Apply action

• Clearer handling of log-search timeouts

• Improved syslog and event-export reliability

• More accurate operational dashboards and reports

• Additional event details for certificate troubleshooting

⚙️ More efficient application administration

Customer-driven enhancements improve the consistency and reliability of frequently used application-management workflows.

Benefits

• More consistent configuration snapshot imports

• Improved CDN health checks when SNI is enabled

• Improved User-Agent allow-list handling

• Clearer event correlation through application identifiers in syslog events

• More consistent navigation through account-selection persistence

• Improved user-interface stability and platform resilience

Explore the improvements

Review the latest capabilities within your Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service environment.

• Visit Bot Protection > AI Crawlers to understand crawler activity and manage access policies

• Review certificate lifecycle events for additional activation, validation, and provider information

• Use the updated log-search and event-export experience during operational investigations

Learn more

Explore WAF-as-a-Service Bot Protection documentation

Need assistance? Contact Barracuda Technical Support for product assistance.