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

It's really challenging at times to contend with multiple vulnerabilities on a daily basis, and having a way to make sense of what actually needs to be prioritized and what can be shifted further down the task list is extremely helpful. Because the solution suggests what your next step should be in mitigating a specific vulnerability, it helps us save time and research by enabling us to immediately take action after being informed about an issue.

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.

• Identifies vulnerabilities and they are easily understood.
• Easy to identify remedies in an instant.
• Campaign feature is a true time saver
• Our CSM, Nino, is the best I have ever worked with!

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

I wasn't here at the time when the company compared different vulnerability management platforms so I'm not sure on the reasoning and difference between the 2. It could be that the team went through different choices and found Vulcan to be the best fit. It's hard for me to say why Vulcan was specifically chosen

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

• 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