Like all vulnerabilities that make the news, the recent MOVEit vulnerability might tempt enterprises to quickly jump in a very tactical manner. Similarly, it might even cause vendors to shift into an “ambulance chaser” mode. Despite the pressure to react tactically, a strategic response is a far better approach.
Application and API security is a topic that is of the utmost importance for enterprises. It is also a somewhat complex topic that is easier to discuss than it is to get right. Because of this, enterprises typically work with a strategic partner to ensure that they are protected from the widest variety of threats—from the very elementary to the extremely sophisticated. In particular, in state government, local government, and higher education (SLED), there is a lot of prized, sensitive data that motivated attackers are eager to access.
Before we can protect our applications and APIs, we need to know what they are and where they are. This is called API discovery. Despite our best efforts to control and monitor the development and deployment life cycle, unknown cases of infrastructure, applications, and APIs are always popping up without the knowledge or support of IT and security. It is because of this that discovery is so important.
Assuming we have a decent handle on what applications and APIs we have and where they are, we can move to focus on protecting those applications and APIs from security and fraud threats. This includes protecting them from exploitation of vulnerabilities, fraud/business logic abuse, unauthorized access, breaches, theft of PII or other sensitive data, and automated attacks. A trusted partner that specializes in this advanced level of protection can be a tremendous asset to an enterprise.
Some examples of these advanced protection capabilities include app proxies, rate limiting and fast Access Control Lists (ACLs), WAF, DDoS protection, bot defense, auto-certificates, malicious user detection, URI routing, service policies, synthetic monitors, TLS fingerprinting, device identification, cross-site request forgery protection, and others.
Working with a trusted partner helps enterprises ensure that they are better protected against yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s attack headlines, rather than only against the hot news item of the day. Today’s news item will quickly be replaced with tomorrow’s, and enterprises that are not prepared for that will face the same tactical fire drill all over again.
See this resource for more information and contact the F5 team to schedule a demo.
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