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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VMware AppDefense (discontinued)
Score 4.0 out of 10
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VMware AppDefense was a hypervisor-native workload protection platform for enterprise virtualization and security teams, used to deliver a secure virtual infrastructure and simplify micro-segmentation planning by providing application visibility, reputation scoring, and security. The product is discontinued, and no longer available.
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
I believe that the product is priced well enough that a small business that is concerned with data center security can justify using the product. My environment hasn't scaled up very far yet, but I am a little concerned that when we get to a certain point, the management console will get full and be more difficult to track. An enterprise customer might see that as a problem.
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.
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 were advised that vShield will be retired and its functionality was being integrated with App Defense. Carbon Black is or was the only AV vendor that integrated with it. A priority for us was to use a VMware supported solution. Sophos Intercept X was creating their own module. Trend Micro Deep Security didn't have any plans in place to move from vShield.
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.
For the cost of the upgrade to vSphere Platinum compared to the costs we were already paying for vSphere Enterprise Plus with Operations Management was comparable. It made sense to upgrade and with that, we received the added features of AppDefense.
