F5 Anti-Fraud Solutions: Frictionless Protection for the Masses

Anti-Fraud Solutions: Why F5?

In 2013, F5 Networks grew its security portfolio to include advanced Anti-Fraud services with the acquisition of the Israeli-based security company Versafe. At the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week, we have a section of our F5 booth dedicated to the Anti-Fraud solution where we are talking about the technology, answering questions and demonstrating the capabilities all week. If you cannot make it to the conference or even if you attended but missed us at our booth, that’s not a problem. I’ll fill you in on some of the details.

First, just walking around the RSA Conference, it’s clear that there is no shortage of anti-fraud solutions on the market. The number is mind blowing and continuously growing. As new threats emerge, new technologies are introduced to combat them. But if you look at the approaches each company takes, they are often quite different. So that begs the question: why F5?

Well, from a feature and function standpoint, we cover a wide range of web-based fraud detection and protection capabilities. The WebSafe solution, which protects web-based applications, safeguards against various forms of malicious activity including phishing attacks, Man-In-The-Middle, Man-In-The-Browser and Trojan activity such as web injections, form hijacking, page modifications and transaction modification.

But what makes the solution unique is that it enables 100% coverage of the user base in a completely clientless manner, without impacting the user experience. We inject our obfuscated code via an iRule, into the web application code as part of the response data. In other words, the solution is completely frictionless, which is key differentiator number one.

And because the solution leverages common browser-based technologies, we protect users who are navigating from all types of devices: laptops, PCs, tablets, smart TVs, mobile devices, etc. As long as the user is navigating with a standard web browser, they will be protected. This is key differentiator number two.

From a deployment standpoint, today the WebSafe solution is implemented via an iRule on an F5 device (either physical or virtual), so there is no need to introduce changes to the web applications our customers are looking to protect from online fraud. This saves time when deploying the solution because there is no need to engage web development resources which are often outsourced or already engaged in critical projects. Our ability to deploy without these web application changes equates to savings and is key value proposition number three.

As a matter of fact, many F5 customers can leverage their current F5 investment and deploy the Anti-Fraud services on their existing infrastructure, requiring no additional hardware investment: differentiator number four.

Lastly, WebSafe provides protection against online fraud without a client install and with no change in the online users’ experience. Introducing CAPTCHAs, popups, etc is often too intrusive to the end user, so we are looking to protect the users without introducing friction in the process.

Summary

If you are at the RSA Conference, stop by booth 1801. We would be happy to demonstrate our Anti-Fraud solution and help to enhance your fraud protection capabilities. If you are not at RSA, look for further details here. We will be posting more details about F5’s Anti-Fraud solutions throughout the coming weeks.