F5 Networks
introduced new offerings that provide advanced access controls and
dedicated SSL visibility with orchestration capabilities to help thwart
today's most sophisticated cyber attacks. In addition, F5 Labs has
published its 2018 Application Protection report, exploring the many
different types of application-based threats that modern organizations
face.
"Applications
are everywhere, and increasingly interrelated, with many added
capabilities inadvertently yielding new opportunities for attack," said
Ram Krishnan, SVP and General Manager, Security at F5. "Our value
proposition is simple: we give you the ability to deploy standalone or
integrated security for all types of applications, environments, and use
cases. Customers enjoy the versatility of world-class products,
cloud-based solutions, support services, and F5's broad security
capabilities that can protect applications better than anyone else in
the industry."
F5 SSL Orchestrator: Unified Management of Encrypted Application Traffic
While
most traffic and data handled by applications is now encrypted, many
security stack service offerings (e.g., firewalls and IPS) are unable to
efficiently process SSL encrypted traffic at the scale and speed
businesses demand. Beyond mere SSL awareness and offload, F5 SSL Orchestrator provides policy-based
orchestration capabilities across the full security service chain for
any network topology, device, or application.
Orchestration
on this level groups devices into services to intelligently decrypt and
steer traffic, allowing for independent monitoring, load balancing, and
scaling to adapt to changing network conditions and increasing traffic
demands. This marks a vast improvement over the industry's legacy
security model, where piecemeal inspection devices perform decryption
independently, frequently leaving gaps for attackers.
As a dedicated security appliance delivering insight to mitigate threats traversing the network, SSL Orchestrator provides:
- Operational
Efficiency - Dynamic service chaining and policy-based traffic steering
help organizations intelligently manage encrypted traffic flows across
the entire app security infrastructure.
- Full
Visibility - High-performance decryption and encryption of inbound and
outbound SSL/TLS traffic enable quicker threat detection and attack
remediation.
- Improved
Risk Management - SSL orchestration lets organizations maximize their
investments around malware, DLP, ransomware, and firewall protections,
safeguarding user privacy through hardened security with robust cipher
management.
"App
security is the definition of a moving target," said Clint Huffaker,
Technical Solutions Architect at World Wide Technology. "Visibility is
one of the biggest challenges organizations are facing today, and F5's
SSL Orchestrator gives customers the ability to dynamically control and
customize the flow of encrypted traffic through security service chains.
We have demos in our Advanced Technology Center to give customers a
hands-on experience where they can see the level of visibility it brings
to security tools in a service chain. Our customers want to work with
industry leaders like F5 that understand the evolving threat landscape,
provide a balance between application performance and risk mitigation,
and offer effective ways to increase visibility and protect apps from
malicious activity."
F5 Access Manager: New Identity-Aware Access Proxy
Applications remain the principal gateways to organizations' and individuals' valuable information. F5 Access Manager protects
sensitive data with a Zero Trust model while providing access for
authorized users, devices, and APIs, guarding against pervasive threats
such as man-in-the-middle attacks. Product features enable organizations
to think outside of traditional security boundaries, empowering them to
unlock additional business models and operational efficiencies without
compromising protections around apps, users, and data.
As a secure, flexible, high-performance proxy solution delivering unified global access management, F5 Access Manager provides:
- Streamlined
Access Controls - Context-sensitive policies with guided configuration
deliver trusted access to users, devices, and APIs for increased
business efficiency, while real-time web form encryption safeguards user
credentials and prevents fraud.
- Accelerated
Business Innovation - As IT transforms to support continuous deployment
methodologies, Access Manager provides a centralized solution for
access control, including API authorization. This means DevOps teams can
hand off apps to NetOps personnel more quickly, and NetOps can better
deliver a consistent user experience without sacrificing manageability.
- Scalability
into the Cloud - While SaaS and cloud applications provide numerous
advantages, many organizations are choosing not to move all apps
off-premises. With advanced F5 virtual edition support
and high-capacity licensing, Access Manager provides the scale
necessary to bridge on-prem app functionality to the cloud, effectively
integrating with IDaaS solutions and capabilities to support evolving
heterogenous environments.
The 2018 Application Protection Report: New Research from F5 Labs
A
formidable defense requires not only an in-depth understanding of apps,
but also a holistic view of their vulnerabilities, threats, and the
variable levels of acceptable risks for users, data, and the surrounding
infrastructure. F5 experts spent a year researching the increasingly
essential role of applications with one question in mind: If
organizations don't understand all the ways attackers can compromise
their applications and exploit their data, how can they possibly defend
their most critical assets?
F5
Labs conducted extensive research including a survey of thousands of
security professionals worldwide with the Ponemon Institute, global web
attack data from tens of thousands of Loryka sensors, security
vulnerability data from WhiteHat Security, and a deep review of
thousands of published exploits and hundreds of documented U.S. breach
cases in partnership with Whatcom Community College Cybersecurity Center
faculty. External research was then combined with F5 internal data sets
on DDoS attacks and major incidents, and analyzed by dozens of F5
security experts.
Findings
uncovered that web application attacks were the largest cause of
security breaches (30 percent), with the average loss from a serious web
application security incident estimated at nearly $8 Million. It was
also revealed that a typical organization runs 765 web applications,
with 34 percent considered mission-critical.
Featuring the most comprehensive analysis of its kind, F5's 2018 Application Protection report:
- Explores
core threat areas and their impact on apps in developing application
protection strategies that work for individual organizations and their
particular priorities.
- Highlights
the differences between Opportunists and Targeted Attackers, along with
an overview of their differing motivations, methods, and entry points.
- Provides
five simple steps with a high impact on improving application security
by addressing each of the primary tiers of typical web applications.
Many more details, attack illustrations, and prescriptive guidance are available by downloading the full report.
Availability
F5's
SSL Orchestrator and Access Manager products as described above will be
generally available in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2018. F5
Labs' 2018 Application Protection report is available now.