Metasploit vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense

In security of information it's vital to think like a hacker and it's important to know the tools they use for attacks. So this software gives you the exploits that are already in the wild and to the access of everyone. That's very dangerous so you have to be aware of it.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Scanning our network for new or existing vulnerable systems.
• Automation of manual tests and exploits to allow what used to be days of effort to be squeezed into hours.
• Metasploit has become an integral part in our validation of new systems before their inclusion in our production network.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• If Metasploit could support payloads written in languages other than Ruby, that would be amazing and could help draw in a larger set of contributors.

Incentivized

• On a technical side, we've had a lot of deployment issues. This is not a one-sprint solution.
• We ran into undocumented failure modes and had to rely on L2 and L3 customer support, delaying troubleshooting significantly [in our experience].
• Accurate log ingestion is a larger challenge than one would want in a security tool.

We are more likely than not, to renew it. It saved us from a really huge data breach 4 months ago. It has earned its shower so far

Incentivized

We don't use it.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Acunetix vulnerability scanner, Netsparker, SQLMap

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• We have been able to weed out false positives with a more manual vetting of scanned vulnerabilities.
• Our teams have become more well versed in penetration testing with Metasploit to understand the vulnerabilities potentially present.

Incentivized

• 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.