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F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP Delivers Leading-Edge Protection Against Bot Attacks

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Published March 14, 2022

The business world today is driven by apps, which means that more than ever, application security is business security. But as application architectures modernize, cloud adoption is growing, and workloads are expanding to the edge—which means that your application attack surface is also becoming exponentially larger. In this environment, traditional web application firewall (WAF) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) solutions just aren't sufficient to protect your complex mix of apps and APIs from an increasing number of threats and evolving attacks. You need better protection (more comprehensive, easier to deploy, and with real-time defenses) against automated bot attacks and API-specific threats. And that is precisely what F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP delivers.

Distributed Cloud WAAP (Web App and API Protection) is a multi-layered solution that delivers leading WAF capabilities combined with DDoS mitigation and bot protection as well as API protection. By combining all these capabilities into an easily deployed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, F5 delivers leading-edge security, enabled by a simplified set of controls, to protect applications and APIs against a wide range of threats.

Protect Against Malicious Bots

While the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform delivers comprehensive security capabilities, I want to focus here on protection against malicious bots. No matter where or how your application ecosystem is deployed, F5 is committed to continually improving ease of use, visibility, and the ability to identify automated, malicious traffic patterns to protect your apps and data. And of course, this includes working closely with our technology partners throughout the industry to ensure your ongoing return on investment and continued ability to take advantage of security measures you may already have in place. All of which will enable you to deploy comprehensive bot protection more easily and quickly.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services operate across a global network of data centers, providing cloud-native application infrastructure and delivering robust, effective application and API protection services on a broad scale. Distributed Cloud Bot Defense is an important component of comprehensive application protection, and our solutions manage and deflect malicious automation—while also brokering legitimate machine-to-machine communication—to defend against business logic risks such as web fraud, intellectual property theft, credential stuffing, account takeover, industrial espionage, denial of service, and more. Key capabilities include:

  • Layered defenses that protect bandwidth and services from performance degradation and outages
  • Protection from credential stuffing that mitigates unauthorized access and account takeover
  • Client-side defenses that prevent attacks that steal sensitive data through browser or third-party exploits
  • Behavioral defenses that slash fraud losses by protecting against imitation attacks that emulate human behavior
  • Removal of high-friction mechanisms, including CAPTCHA and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), in order to improve the overall user experience
  • Shared threat intelligence across similar attack profiles and risk surfaces to maximize effectiveness
  • Dynamic mitigations that maintain full efficacy as attackers retool and evolve to overcome countermeasures

The list above comes as no surprise for customers and partners who already know F5 and its bot defense capabilities. However, what is new is how we deliver these services across the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform. This platform enables a robust new ecosystem and exciting new integration opportunities—a truly thrilling prospect for those of us at F5, our technology partners, and the users we serve!

When it comes to anti-bot protection, F5 is continually working to develop ways that the platform can make it easier to integrate telemetry and usage data to remove or reduce current limitations. For example, through our partnership with Promon, customers have a quick and simple way to add Distributed Cloud Bot Defense to their mobile apps using the Promon SDK Integrator (see the use case article for more details). In the retail sector, we utilize a connector to easily integrate Distributed Cloud Bot Defense to secure and defend customers’ Salesforce Commerce Cloud applications (see the use case article for more details).

Going forward with the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform, we have the potential to utilize SDKs or similar tools to extract previously unavailable telemetry directly to the security edge. By doing so, Distributed Cloud Bot Defense will take the necessary security and response actions at the edge before malicious code reaches the origin servers. This can eliminate unnecessary resource consumption at the origin (or along its route) and, consequently, reduce operational costs to the business.

Soon, customers and alliance partners alike will be delighted to see F5 expand its Distributed Cloud Bot Defense capabilities to new horizons as our integrated solutions are deployed across the full range of cloud PaaS solutions, SaaS apps, hybrid-origin architectures, and CDN provider platforms to ensure every enterprise has access to advanced bot defense and sophisticated security monitoring.

For more information, please contact your F5 sales representative to discuss exciting new opportunities for secure digital experiences enabled by F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP. You can also check out F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP for free via our interactive simulator and find more information throughout f5.com.

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