Evolving Financial Services and how to protect against sophisticated cyber threats

In an era where cyber threats evolve as rapidly as digital innovation, financial institutions face unprecedented challenges. Balancing security, performance, and compliance is no longer optional—it’s critical to survival. F5 empowers financial organizations to modernize their operations, safeguard customer trust, and stay ahead of competitors through a robust suite of solutions designed to mitigate risks, optimize performance, and ensure regulatory compliance.

This article (first in a series) provides an overview of how F5 addresses the pressing challenges of modern financial services, from securing APIs to neutralizing sophisticated DDoS attacks. Let’s explore how F5 enables you to deliver fast, reliable, and secure digital experiences—every time.

What to expect?

Here's what to expect in this article,

Technical articles covering related F5 solutions.
Overview about how F5 products are able to handle different aspects in Financial services,
- F5 BIG-IP
- F5 Distributed Cloud
- NGINX

Mitigating Application Vulnerability

Financial institutions are prime targets for cybercriminals. F5’s layered security approach ensures resilience against evolving threats.

Protecting against OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities (e.g., injection attacks, broken authentication) evolved from just mere web protection, to web, API, LLM. You can explore examples of solutions across BIG-IP Advanced WAF, F5 Distributed Cloud, and NGINX which actively blocks exploits while maintaining application performance through those articles,

Encrypted Traffic Inspection

BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator (SSLO) enables organizations to decrypt and inspect encrypted traffic without compromising speed, ensuring threats hidden in SSL/TLS traffic are neutralized, this series or articles shows different integration use cases with BIG-IP SSLO.

Implementing SSL Orchestrator - High Level Considerations | DevCentral

Bot Mitigation

Bot attacks lead to fraud, operational disruptions, and reputational damage by enabling account takeovers, credential stuffing, and synthetic fraud. These attacks increase infrastructure costs, cause service downtime through DDoS, and expose institutions to regulatory penalties.
Mitigating such attacks starts at multiple levels, below we are listing some of the helpful items on how to combat Bot attacks.

Securing APIs and Third-Party Integrations

APIs drive innovation but introduce risks like data breaches and downtime. how we can tackle API security depends on the applications need to be protected, whether we rely on BIG-IP, F5 Distributed Cloud or NGINX, or the Hybrid integration of different components,

This series is about API security, will be a great start Use of NGINX Controller to Authenticate API Calls | DevCentral
And to understand more about WAAP, What is WAAP?Community Learning Path: Web Application and API Protection (WAAP)

Preventing DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks can cause a lot of impact to the business, whether it’s immediate impact by preventing the business from serving its customer or non-immediate one by impacting business brand image and ability to secure their customers and their data.

DDoS attack vectors may vary from targeting application, bandwidth, resources like CPU, Memory or critical protocols like DNS, TCP or UDP.

You can explore some interesting use cases on F5 DDoS mitigation through the below,

Conclusion

In this introduction article, we went through an overview of F5 solutions in Financial Services, in the following articles, we will dig a bit deeper with each solution. F5 not only helps with security but with maximizing performance as well.

Evolving Financial Services and how to protect against sophisticated cyber threats

What to expect?