AcuSensor from Maltese company Acunetix is application security and testing software.
$4,500
F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense (formerly Shape Defense, acquired January 2020) provides security to protect a website from bots, fake users, and unauthorized transactions, preventing large scale fraud and eroded user experiences. Companies get visibility, detection and mitigation outcomes to reduce fraud and cloud hosting, bandwidth and compute costs, improve user experiences, and optimize their business based on real human traffic.
Acunetix scales well from a small web development presence like ours to a full-scale enterprise focused on that. The various tools and sensors that provide assurance of the results and can give feedback down to the lines of code in the source are proof of this. Various integrations exist as well. The main thing for us is that it simplifies confirming and remediating potential issues in our code or proving that products we use have issues that we can then take to the vendor for correction.
I'd strongly recommend it, but with a few caveats depending on how mature the team is with behavioral based security tools. One of our fintech clients was getting hit with low volume, widely spread login attempts, below our rate limiting thresholds. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense was able to flag abnormal input timings, inconsistent device fingerprinting and high entropy in field population behavior. You can only imagine the wave of downstream account lockouts this saved the client. On the other end we had a client with a real time trading platform using Graphql over websockets. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense wasn't able to tap into that stream natively. we had to reverse engineer a proxy layer to inspect events. It worked but it was clunky and not officially supported
Regularly analyze traffic patterns and bot activity. Use the insights provided by the platform to refine rules and policies.
Configure rules to specify acceptable behavior for user interactions and alter sensitivity levels as appropriate to reduce false positives.
Integrate F5 Bot Defense into our existing security stack, which may include WAFs (Web Application Firewalls) and SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solutions.
Does not support multiple endpoints well (e.g. apps and services that do not reside at the same URL).
Has authentication problems with modern enterprise apps which involve a lot of redirects to unrelated endpoints, federated IDs, SSO, etc. This is related to the first point.
The vulnerability detection capability is not as robust as Burp Suite Pro + extensions, Metasploit + auxiliary modules, Nmap + scripts, etc.
Official support can sometimes take time to reach the right people. However, once you are in contact with the appropriate experts, the support is excellent, as F5 staff are true specialists. On the other hand, we always receive prompt assistance from our local sales team, who typically help us connect with the right people quickly.
Implementation of Distributed Cloud is accomplished a few different ways, it would pay to meet with the F5 team and map out your implementation prior to acquisition to make sure you Infrastructure and Operations teams are aligned to the approach and requirements.
In my opinion Acunetix fares good in DevSecOps pipeline better than Appspider. In terms of vulnerabilities scanning of dynamic applications I liked Rapid7, however we have better ROI with Acunetix. During 6 months of usage I tried to look into cost benefit analysis and could easily pick Acunetix and in terms of dashboards also I am impressed
Clodflare bot management was our other obvious option for us. We tested it on a staging version of our RFQ platform. It was great for broad traffic filtering but had a hard time with nuanced differences between real subcontractors and low volume bots mimickingt human input whereas that's where F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense thrived
Saved money compared to other commercial scanners, especially over the long run.
Scan speed seems to be pretty good compared to some of the bulkier commercial products out there. However, that largely has to do with proper configuration.
A downside is that is requires a bit of extra work just to get it set up to scan APIs, web services, etc.
We experience large web/data scraping attack campaigns and F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense over the years has helped mitigate these for us and significantly reducing load off of our origin servers.
Also, we experience many large Credential Stuffing attacks and F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense helps us stop these attacks and protects our customers.
