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.
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
Appropriate only for US customers with domestic banking institutions who speak English fluently.
Not appropriate for any foreign vendor to get paid in less than 6 months. The data is poorly designed. The software defaults to domestic banking information such as routing number. Vendors then choose check payments overseas which take 45 days and usually never arrive. I end up submitting the same payments over and over. Customers are always angry and I have no ability to help them.
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.
Software design especially in regards to entering foreign bank accounts
Customer service never really assists the customer
Admins are not notified when there is incomplete registration or problems with the information entered. We have to wait for the customer to contact us and by that time they are very angry and their payment is very delayed
The only language available is English. The tax forms are only available in English
Administrators hate the system because they cannot see any information in order to assist customers. Customers hate it because registration is lengthy and difficult and only available in English
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
I was not involved in this choice and the people who chose the system are not end users of this software. The end user experience was never considered when this decision was made. Admins and customers hate PaymentWorks. It is only effective at wasting your time and money and employee resources
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
Zero return on investment. It takes 3 people to do the work that one person used to be able to manage.
The only way that I can find out if there are problems is if the customer contacts me about non-payment.
Zero integration with our accounting software. New vendors have to be manually transferred from PaymentWorks to the accounting software. Updates to PaymentWorks have to be manually carried from one system to the other. There are no notifications when these processes have been completed
