Black Duck Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense

If you are using a lot of open-source libraries, which is most likely, this is a must-have to ensure no known vulnerabilities slip into production

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

• Quick inventory scan: Black Duck helps us scan the code repositories in no time. And quickly list the components and I now really know what is in my code.
• Security and License risk management: Black Duck being rich in its knowledge base about the vulnerabilities and license issues of open source components, quickly compares the identified inventory to the Black Duck knowledge base and lists all the vulnerabilities and license issues in the code.
• Integration for automatic scanning: Black Duck is part of devops which provides us automatic scanning. Black Duck is not just for devops but also SecOps.

Incentivized

• Quickly helps mitigate the retooling and newer advanced bot attacks
• Excellent customer service from our f5 bot Defense team/partners
• Easy to do Traffic Analysis/False Positive reviews with their dashboard of data
• Our F5 Security/Solutions Architect and TAM is always there for us whenever we need them
• First class service by the F5 Distributed Cloud Bot DefenseSOC, the Tactics Team, the F5 Testing person that helps us, the mobile SDK experts, the Client-Side Signals experts and F5 management
• Industry best Threat Briefings
• Not only is F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense great at stopping the advanced bot attacks, they also have protection against any tampering or replay attacks.

• License model based on usage is costly.
• Documentation is extensive, but often confusing.
• Black Duck Hub could use some feature improvements for more robust governance capabilities

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

If you don’t know how to scan for the language, it isn’t entirely user friendly

Incentivized

Support seems very responsive.

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

Black Duck is an obvious choice, with its versatility, integration, best enterprise support and on top of the list the knowledge base Black Duck has. Vega or Grabber also scans the application and tells about vulnerabilities. But it can never be compared with the feature set of Black Duck. Black Duck can also generate reports.

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

• It is hard to measure ROI since Black Duck Hub saves us from costly legal battles that have thankfully never had to happen.

Incentivized

• Prior to F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense, we were averaging 12k plus credential stuffing attempts weekly across client portals That number fell down to less than a thousand in just 4 weeks
• Over 90 percent of scraping and unauthorized price harvesting blocked