Carbon Black App Control is an application control product, used to lock down servers and critical systems, prevent unwanted changes and ensure continuous compliance with regulatory mandates.
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F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense
Score 8.7 out of 10
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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.
It is more suited to lock down critical systems and servers to prevent unwanted changes, although you can use it on daily basis on laptops and desktops, it needs constant attention and events analysis. For some scenarios i.e. financial institutions it is a must-have solution, as App Control now is a requirement 5 of PCI DSS.
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
Device Control - you can view and allow/disallow the ability for certain devices to be used in your environment. Specifically we used this with USB drives. If you have one you want to use - whitelist the serial number. The rest can't be used. Simple and easy.
Software blocking. If you have an extremely dynamic software base (I doubt this is likely) this could get a bit annoying, but for most organizations like ours where we have specific applications that are required, and then the rest are a bit of an afterthought, it's easy to whitelist the correct applications that you want to be able to run in your environment. The rest can't run (in high enforcement). Users are able to easily request new applications, and you can set certain groups to be able to approve it on their own.
Solid platform - with few exceptions setting up new software was very easy (Dragon Medical was a bit tricky, but worked through it with support). Once you have your rules set up and the initial setup done, you tend not to have to do much of anything except to update on occasion and deal with a few requests for applications to be unblocked, or publishes approved.
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.
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.
The big difference between Protect and Barkly/AMP is how exactly it goes about what it's doing. Protect is application whitelisting and program reputation. So the way it's protecting you is using a proprietary reputation service, and hash values to identify applications, and then hitting a list of whitelisted programs to decide if you are able to run that or not, based on the policy you are in. There is a LOT of value in that. We actually are working on transitioning to Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP). The main reason is cost (about the same cost as Cb Protect, but with (most of) the featureset of all 3 Carbon Black products for less than 1/3 of the total spend. AMP works differently, looking at a reputation service powered by Cisco's Talos cloud. You don't really have application whitelisting, but that also reduces how many "requests" you get for applications. So I'll have to find a different way to do whitelisting and USB blocking and the like, but I'm getting more visibility across my network and also built in antivirus (TETRA engine - ClamAV with some work). Barkly is an add that we are looking to put in as it looks at behavior of programs. So specifically it watches for privilege elevation and the like. Thus far all the big name problem children (WannaCry, other ransomware problems) have been caught natively in Barkly day 0.
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
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.
