Block the Bad Guys Everywhere with F5 Silverline Threat Intelligence

There’s an old myth associated with vampires that says they can only enter your home if invited. Obviously it’s in your best interests to not invite that vampire into your home. The problem is, of course, is how do you know that devilishly handsome and very charming fellow asking to come in is, in fact, a vampire?

If you were playing Dungeons and Dragons or watching a movie I could offer you a variety of methods, but in the real world? You’re on your own.

That’s undoubtedly the way many security professionals today feel standing at the doors that lead to their applications – and the hordes of data they ultimately lead to: on their own. With 2.3 million bots actively attacking and 85,000 malicious IP addresses launching every single day, it’s really hard to tell who is legit and who among those clamoring for access to apps is a vampire.

Especially when the vampires are knocking on every door – in the cloud and at home in the data center.

That may be why it was no surprise (to me, at least) that our 2016 State of Application Delivery survey found four of the top five app services most likely to be deployed as a managed cloud offering were security related. In a world increasingly dominated by multi-cloud environments, security professionals are challenged with trying to protect apps on and off-premises at the same time. That’s not easy, particularly when traditional solutions reside on-premises, making it a challenge to extend their ability to identify the vampires amongst the villagers to cloud hosted applications difficult, if not impossible.

Moving these types of services to a managed cloud offering enables organizations to consistently and from a central location apply the same rigorous standards for access to all applications, regardless of where they might deployed. 

That’s why we’re excited to announce our newest “at your service” cloud offering, F5 Silverline Threat Intelligence. F5 Silverline Threat Intelligence is an IP Reputation service delivered via the F5 Silverline cloud-based application services platform with support from highly specialized security experts who build and maintain L4-L7 (application) security policies to defend organizations against web attacks across traditional and cloud environments. 

F5 Silverline Threat Intelligence provides real-time, continuous updates that identify malicious actors using:

Intelligence-based predicted Threat IPs

• Based on observation, context and statistical modeling
• Aging & correlation of Threat IP data

Broad-based threat identification

• Global network of sensors addressing diverse use cases
• Threat IPs are catalogued and tracked indefinitely

Traffic gets directed to F5 Silverline, where F5 Silverline Threat Intelligence goes to work, sorting out the vampires from everyone else using a wide array of techniques. Then it closes the door on the vampires, and lets legitimate users access the apps they need to do their job or buy that gadget or send that e-mail.

Our security experts in the F5 SOC proactively monitor, and fine-tune policies to protect networks and web applications from new and emerging IP threats.

• Expert policy setup
• Policy fine-tuning
• Proactive alert monitoring
• False positives tuning
• Detection tuning
• Allowlist / Denylist set up and monitoring

A portal provides monitoring, reporting, and communications with the F5 SOC team, so you can rest comfortably knowing support, if you need it, is always available.

It’s not just an application world anymore, it’s a multi-cloud distributed application world that’s filled with eager consumers and malicious actors alike. Protecting all your applications consistently and efficiently is an imperative, but one that’s difficult to achieve if you’re relying solely on individual solutions spread across all your various points of presence. A centralized, cloud-based solution like F5 Silverline enables a consistent, operationally efficient means of enforcing consistent policies with the intelligence to detect and refuse entry to vampires no matter what door they may be knocking on.

You can find out more about F5 Silverline Threat Intelligence as well as our F5 Silverline cloud-based application services platform here on f5.com.