AppSec Made Easy: Proactive Bot Defense

Learn how to use the F5 Advanced Web Application Firewall to easily protect your applications against bots. Bots can be used as tools for a variety of attacks such as DoS, credential stuffing and brute force, or web scraping.

See the entire AppSec Made Easy series.

Published May 03, 2018
Version 1.0
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  • Mark_Curole's avatar
    Mark_Curole
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    May 29, 2018

    I've been playing with Proactive Bot Defense and want to know how to deal with a particular situation. I am needing to allow certain bots that has a valid signature that is categorized as a crawler. Is there a way to get specific bots to work without configuring IP exceptions?

     

  • Graham_Alderso1's avatar
    Graham_Alderso1
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    May 30, 2018

    Mark,

     

    I think you have two good options here:

     

    1. iRule - https://devcentral.f5.com/s/articles/proactive-bot-defense-bypass-by-bot-signature-1150

       

    2. If you set the category to report and the signature has a reverse DNS lookup, then it will bypass PBD (note that you need to setup a DNS resolver). If the current one doesn't have reverse DNS on the signature, you could disable the signature, create a custom signature that does have reverse DNS, create a custom category to put it in, and set that custom category to report.