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,
- OWASP top 10 Series
- F5 Hybrid Security Architectures for DevSecOps: F5's Distributed Cloud WAF and BIG-IP Advanced WAF
- BIG-IP Advanced WAF.
- NGINX App Protect.
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.
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.
- An overview of F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense
- Ridiculously Easy Bot Protection: How to Use BIG-IP APM to Streamline Bot Defense Implementation | DevCentral
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,
- NGINX App Protect.
- F5 Distributed Cloud DDoS Mitigation Service.
- DDoS Mitigation with F5 Distributed Cloud
- How to get started with F5 Distributed Cloud Managed Services
- How to easily add DoS protection to your F5 Distributed Cloup applications
- BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager.
- Explanation of F5 DDoS threshold modes | DevCentral
- Concept of F5 Device DoS and DoS profiles | DevCentral
- IP-Intelligence and IP-Shunning | DevCentral
- BIG-IP Advanced WAF.
- F5 Hybrid Security Architectures for DevSecOps: F5's Distributed Cloud WAAP Bot and DDoS Defense and BIG-IP Advanced WAF
- F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF - DOS profile configuration options. | DevCentral
- F5 Hybrid Security Architectures for DevSecOps: F5's Distributed Cloud WAF and BIG-IP Advanced WAF
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.
Related Content
- Testing the security controls for a notional FDX Open Banking deployment
- Decoding PCI-DSS v4.0: F5's Ridiculously Easy Guide to Technical Compliance
- Banking and Financial Services
- Why Top Financial Services Companies Rely on F5
- NGINX App Protect.
- F5 Distributed Cloud DDoS Mitigation Service.
- DDoS Mitigation with F5 Distributed Cloud
- How to get started with F5 Distributed Cloud Managed Services
- How to easily add DoS protection to your F5 Distributed Cloup applications
- BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager.
- Explanation of F5 DDoS threshold modes | DevCentral
- Concept of F5 Device DoS and DoS profiles | DevCentral
- IP-Intelligence and IP-Shunning | DevCentral
- BIG-IP Advanced WAF.
- F5 Hybrid Security Architectures for DevSecOps: F5's Distributed Cloud WAAP Bot and DDoS Defense and BIG-IP Advanced WAF
- F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF - DOS profile configuration options. | DevCentral
- F5 Hybrid Security Architectures for DevSecOps: F5's Distributed Cloud WAF and BIG-IP Advanced WAF
- Overview of WAAP Incidents
- What is WAAP?