F5 Unleashes Silverline Shape Defense Post-Shape Security Acquisition

F5 Networks, which acquired Shape Security earlier this year, is rolling out its new Silverline Shape Defense managed service.

Silverline Shape Defense protects websites from a growth in fake internet traffic. Therefore, customers can better focus on their users and safeguard businesses against bots, credential stuffing, scraping and other automated attacks.

These attacks result in fraud and abuse, leading to compromised efficiency, loss of revenue and damage to the brand.

F5 acquired Square Security, a provider of app security and fraud prevention solutions, for $1 billion.

Mike Plante is F5‘s vice president of product marketing for the Shape and Silverline product group. He said the offering brings Shape’s anti-bot technology to the Silverline platform. It’s the first part of a long-term strategy to provide Shape services to organizations.

F5 Networks’ Mike Plante

“Now customers can benefit from industry-leading anti-bot technology rounding out a complete security stack (Silverline Shape Defense, Silverline WAF and Silverline DDoS) managed through a common, integrated portal providing a single view for all Silverline services,” he said. “This can include configuration proxy and routing, visibility into threat details, attack analytics and actions taken by SOC experts.”

How It Works

Silverline Shape Defense uses artificial intelligence to accurately determine if an application request is from a human or a bot. And it further differentiates between a bad actor and authorized person.

This approach stops bad traffic without making it tough for legitimate users to log in.

“The level of sophistication of today’s cybercriminal enterprises is astounding,” Plante said. “And traditional anti-bot technologies are largely ineffective against it. The combination of Silverline and Shape Defense will provide F5 partners with an integrated, easy-to-buy and easy-to-deploy solution set that can begin protecting apps in less than 30 minutes.”

Plante says offering a complete solution from a single vendor is an advantage for partners.

“This represents the best first opportunity for the channel to leverage Shape defenses,” he said. “And everything we’ve learned from defeating a billion attacks per day.”

The amount of data and visibility into a company’s web traffic trends creates additional professional service opportunities for partners, he said.

Businesses benefit from reduced online fraud loss, lower operating costs and an improved user experience, according to F5.

“Silverline Shape Defense brings together security-as-a-service elements largely left to boutique firms in the past,” Plante said. “Silverline Shape defense is an outsourced managed service to allow our partners to roll fully functional security offers to assist customers with both preventative solutions and protection under duress.”