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.
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Veracode
Score 8.7 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Veracode provides advanced application security solutions, trusted by enterprises to develop and maintain secure software. Its platform identifies exploitable risks, speeds up vulnerability remediation, and reduces security debt at scale using a proprietary AI-assisted remediation engine.
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
* (+) Report generation for our clients: reports are very comprehensive and look professional. * (-) Veracode pipeline scan: takes too much time, need to split our application so that it can fit within the timeout (2h). Currently we're not able to use it, we still use "upload & scan" functionality in our CI pipelines. This is a showstopper to be able to break the build in case of new vuln, and also to use Fix AI based tool.
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.
We would like to see Veracode continue to improve the integrations available, particularly with respect to .NET IDEs. Part of our development team uses JetBrains' Rider which is, as of this time, unsupported for static integration.
We would also like to see Veracode continue to improve their dynamic scan offerings; with the recent addition of DAST Essentials we feel this improvement may come sooner than later.
At this time, and we just renewed a month ago, I dont see any products out there overall that can offer what Veracode does. Yes, its not cheap by any means, but for the money its the best application security scanning tool out there.
- Almost no setup required and easy to configure - Very easy to use, intuitive UI with integrated analytics and learning portals. - Seamless to review the results, triage them, generate reports. - Security progression of the product/application is tracked via successive scans. - Privileges/Roles nicely fine grained and tightly controlled to let teams "view" only their products.
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.
Overall, Veracode support is helpful, community support is great, and documentation is available for self-service. Our Customer Success Manager is very helpful and reaches out regularly to see if we need assistance. We have not utilized many of the other resources offered by Veracode, however, in the future we would like to leverage secure coding training for our Development teams.
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.
We use it as a SAS service, so really just getting our teams to mold the use of Veracode into their SDLC has been a process of years in the making. It comes down to what your teams are ready and willing to accept and change. Management is key in getting their groups on board with using it regularly. If it doesnt have management backing, your security teams have little to no influence in getting this process off the ground fully.
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
Sonatype only identifies and scans third-party dependency and not custom-developed code—at least that's what it was doing back in 2018 when I used to utilize its services. Interface-wise, too, Veracode looks much cleaner and easier to navigate than Sonatype. Support and consultation with how-to guides and documents make Veracode easier to use.
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.
Positive: Scanning all our applications on Veracode provides us an overview of our cyber security posture for the organization as a whole.
Positive: Performing the SAST, SCA and DAST scanning for all the applications at the early stages of the SDLC helps us identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities early, reducing the risk of data breaches and cyber-attacks.
Negative: Sometimes Veracode SAST scanner closed and reopens some findings, leading to reliability issues on the scanner itself.
