BIG-IP AFM Blacklisting Magic
Have you ever wondered which IP addresses floating around out there on the Internet are the good ones? The benign ones? The malicious ones? You get the idea. Peter Silva recently published an article that discusses the IP Intelligence feature of the BIG-IP where each IP address is examined and an intelligent decision is made about how good or bad the address is. As the BIG-IP compiles all the data from the IP Intelligence feeds, it can automatically add IP addresses to one or more Blacklist categories for a specified period of time. Blacklist(noun) : a list of items (usernames, IP addresses, etc) that are denied access to a system It’s nice to know that you don’t have to manually add all the Blacklist IP addresses any more. However, you certainly still have the flexibility to add items to a Blacklist category if you’d like. To view the Blacklist category names on the BIG-IP AFM, navigate to Security >> Network Firewall >> IP Intelligence >> Black List Categories and you will see the default categories listed there. The BIG-IP AFM comes preloaded with several Black List categories (i.e. botnets, phishing, spam_sources, etc). Check out the screenshot below for a view of the Black List category page. In addition to the categories already loaded on the BIG-IP, you can create your own categories as well. To do this, simply click the “Create” button on the upper/right portion of the Black List Category page, and you can create a name, description, and Match Type (Source, Destination, or Both) for your category. These categories are important when creating IP Intelligence policies because, when you create an IP Intelligence policy, you can specify what action to take on an IP address from a particular feed list when it matches an IP address in one of your Black List categories. See the screenshot below for details on creating a new Black List Category. Now that you have a new Black List category, it will show up in the full listing of Black List categories. Notice in the screenshot below that my newly created Black List Category is listed. While the BIG-IP AFM will take care of automatically adding bad IP addresses to the various Black List Categories, you can still manually add IP addresses and assign them to a Black List Category as well. To do this, you navigate to the Black List Category page and type in the IP address in top portion of the page and select a Black List Category from the dropdown menu. Finally, you specify (in seconds) the amount of time the IP address should stay in that particular Black List category. See the screenshot below for details: Auto-Shun in Version 12.0 In BIG-IP version 12.0, the "auto-shun" feature was introduced. It allows you to configure a DoS protection profile to watch for a Source IP address and, if it exceeds the detection threshold for a given period of time, it is automatically added to a Blacklist category for a configurable period of time. See the chart below for more details: Many organizations struggle with maintaining a good and timely list of bad IP addresses, but now you have the power of the BIG-IP AFM that can do it all for you automatically!Get Smart with IP Intelligence
There are always threats out there on the big bad internet. The majority of breaches happen at the application layer and many OWASP Top 10s like SQL injection are still malicious favorites to gain entry. Add to that the availability of DDoS tools, anonymous proxies and the rise of hacktivism means networks and systems are bigger targets than ever. Threat detection today relies on a couple elements: Identifying suspicious activity among the billions of data points and refining a large set of suspicious incidents down to those that matter. Today’s cyber-criminals use various techniques to hide their identities and activity. Keeping them out of your systems requires constant vigilance. Every packet that transverses the internet has a source IP address so disabling inbound communications from known malicious IPs can be highly effective. You may not know but F5 offers IP Intelligence Services which provides the functionality to block known malicious IP addresses. It is a layer of IP threat protection and an additional way to allow BIG-IP customers to defend against malicious activity and infrastructure attacks. The IP Intelligence service is offered on several BIG-IP platforms. With IP Intelligence, BIG-IP AFM can be configured to block or allow traffic entering the system based on the reputation of the source IP address. BIG-IP AFM determines reputation using two methods. One is a continuous feed of known or suspected malicious IP addresses provided by a third-party service Webroot BrightCloud. You can also create custom feed lists that specifies IP addresses that have been blacklisted or whitelisted by the organization. The BrightCloud feed is updated every 5 minutes by default and custom feed lists are unique to the AFM and are polled at intervals of your choosing. These two methods are jointly referred to as IP Intelligence and can be used independently or in tandem to filer traffic on the BIG-IP systems. The BrightCloud option is licensed separately through F5 and requires internet connectivity and DNS resolution from your BIG-IP system. Custom feed lists do not need connectivity since it is local to the BIG-IP. IP Intelligence can be applied via AFM firewall policy to the Route Domain or Virtual Server. Once enabled, it will affect all traffic that arrives on your BIG-IP system no matter the access point. The IP Intelligence data is organized into categories that help you differentiate between types of listed IP addresses. There are 11 pre-defined categories including botnets, scanners, infected sources, illegal websites and more. These correspond to the categories in the BrightCloud feed. You can also create up to 51 custom categories to meet your own specific needs. Networks, infrastructures, systems and applications are all under attack these days. While you can do your best at securing your data, sometimes a little call blocking can go a long way in ensuring these known rascals cannot get through. Peace of mind is always a secure feeling. ps
