F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense vs. Vulcan Cyber (discontinued)

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

We use Vulcan Cyber to help with the technical debt accrued over time with systems that were not maintained as well as they should be. To combat this, we use the campaign feature to keep a running tab on every system to ensure it is brought up to standards and maintained.

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

• The user interface makes it very easy to use.
• It provides a clear picture and helps us to make decisions.
• It offers automation and risk visibility.

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.

• Deduping of assets could be better.
• The weighting of vulnerabilities is hard to describe to non technical executives.
• The Business Groups and Tagging needs improvement. Or at least allow tags to be removed if not needed. Now they are static from the API feed.

Incentivized

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

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

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

Vulcan was easier to implement with our existing Security environment. The UX and UI were more intuitive and user-friendly. While SOAR is a super solid product, for our business Vulcan made more sense. It was more of a natural fit for a rapidly-expanding company in a hyper-growth phase using Edge technology.

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.

• Allows much better prioritizing of which assets are most vulnerable
• Allow a better understanding of what assets are actually under real threat vs. what is assumed to be vulnerable, but the real world fact is the system would be hard to reach internally, so it's not as vulnerable.

Incentivized