2021 Application Protection Report: Of Ransom and Redemption

 Now in its 4th year, the #F5Labs 2021 Application Protection Report (https://www.f5.com/labs/articles/thre...) is our effort to boil the application security risk landscape down to put the initiative back into the hands of defenders. We analyzed more than 700 data breaches from 2020. Peter Silva starts the clock for an extended edition of some the highlights from F5Labs 2021 #APR in this episode of 90 Seconds of Security.

Get your copy of the 2021 APR

How Ransomware Has Evolved to Be Faster, Stealthier, and Strike Harder

 

Ransomware attacks have reached the boiling point. They’ve gone from nuisance to significant financial burden—as well as a mortal threat to critical infrastructure. Financial damage from ransomware attacks is in the hundreds of millions of dollars for some organizations. And, of course, our F5 Labs threat researchers have something to say about it. So, let’s start the clock to explore How Ransomware Has Evolved to Be Faster, Stealthier, and Strike Harder. 

Full article: https://www.f5.com/labs/articles/threat-intelligence/ransomware-how-it-has-evolved-to-be-faster-stealthier-and-strike-harder

Cloud Interconnection with F5 & Equinix

 Learn how the simplified Interconnection Oriented Architecture (IOA) from #F5 and #Equinix helps IT departments solve the need for mobile and dispersed user access to their cloud infrastructure(s) in a multi-cloud environment.

Learn more: https://www.f5.com/services/resources/use-cases/a-secure-equinix-gateway-to-the-cloud

This architecture allows for services to be deployed at the edge of, or next to the cloud resulting in Fewer hops, Dramatically lower latency, Fault-proof security & Lower Network transport costs - as much as 80% lower. This ‘edge’ architecture provides a natural point for traffic control by having centralized policy control and Security policy enforcement, access control and other services like DDoS protection, AAA and WAF.

90 Seconds of Security: F5 Security at Black Hat USA 2019

Learn about RedTunnel, how to explore internal networks via the DNS rebinding tunnel, and how we used the new SODA (Simulation of DDoS Attacks) tool to defend against rapidly morphing DDoS attacks. You can also download the sessions the F5 Security team delivered at #BHUSA by going to f5.com/blackhat.

90 Seconds of Security: Security Stories for July 2019

A 90 second recap of some of the recent security stories for July 2019. The F5 SIRT (f5.com/sirt) shares some of the security incidents that caught their attention in July. In this episode we cover recent GDPR enforcements, yet another Magecart attack on S3 buckets and Overwhelmed IT personnel.

90 Seconds of Security: Security Incidents for June 2019

A 90 second recap of some of the recent security incidents for June 2019. The F5 SIRT shares some of the security incidents that caught their attention in June. In this episode we cover the recent Mozilla vulnerability, the GandCrab decryptor and Linux Exim issue.

90 Seconds of Security: In the Wild Malware for April 2019

A 90 second recap of 'In the Wild' Vulnerabilities, Exploits, and Malware Driving Attack Campaigns in April 2019.

Get the details at: https://www.f5.com/labs/articles/threat-intelligence/vulnerabilities--exploits--and-malware-driving-attack-campaigns-in-april-2019




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Post of the Week: SSL on a Virtual Server

In this Lightboard Post of the Week, I answer a few questions about SSL/https on Virtual Servers. BIG-IP being a default deny, full proxy device, it's important to configure specific ports, like 443, to accept https traffic along with client and server side profiles and include your SSL certificates. We cover things like SAN/SNI certificates but I failed to mention that self-signed certificates are bad anywhere except for testing or on the server side of the connection.



Thanks to DevCentral members, testimony, Only1masterblaster, Faruk AYDIN, MrPlastic, Tyler G, Prince, and dward for their Q/A engagement.

Posted Questions on DevCentral:

• https on virtual server
• LINKING SSL CERTIFICATE TO A VIRTUAL SERVER
• SSL CERTIFICATE KEY
• Maximum number of client SSL profiles per virtual server?
• Need to support thousands of unique SSL certificates on a single VIP

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Post of the Week: BIG-IP APM Policy Sync

In this Lightboard Post of the Week, I light up the answer to a question about BIG-IP APM Policy Sync. Posted Question on DevCentral: https://devcentral.f5.com/questions/apm-policy-sync-56330

Thanks to DevCentral user Murali (@MuraliGopalaRao) for the question and special thanks to Leonardo Souza for the answer!



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Related:

• DevCentral’s Featured Member for May – NTT Security’s Leonardo Souza

Lightboard Lessons: Connecting Cars with BIG-IP

I light up how BIG-IP and Solace work together in a MQTT connected car infrastructure.



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Related:

• Using F5 BIG-IP and Solace Open Data Movement technology for MQTT message routing and delivery
• Lightboard Lessons: What is MQTT?

Lightboard Lessons: What is HTTP?

In this Lightboard Lesson, I light up some #basics about HTTP. HTTP defines the structure of messages between web components such as browser or command line clients, servers like Apache or Nginx, and proxies like the BIG-IP.



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Related:

• What is HTTP?
• What is HTTP Part II - Underlying Protocols

Lightboard Lessons: BIG-IP ASM Layered Policies

In this Lightboard Lesson, I light up some use cases for BIG-IP ASM Layered Policies available in BIG-IP v13.

With Parent and Child policies, you can:

• Impose mandatory policy elements on multiple policies;
• Create multiple policies with baseline protection settings; and
• Rapidly push changes to multiple policies.

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Lightboard Lessons: What is BIG-IP?

In the early days of F5, BIG/IP was our original load balancer. Today, BIG-IP is a family of products covering software and hardware designed around application availability, access control, and security solutions.

In this Lightboard Lesson, I light up the various BIG-IP modules and what they do.



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Related:

• What Is BIG-IP?
• Lightboard Lessons: BIG-IP Basic Nomenclature
• Lightboard Lessons: What is a Proxy?
• Lightboard Lessons: BIG-IP Life of a Packet
• Lightboard Lessons: Service Consolidation on BIG-IP
• Lightboard Lessons: The BIG-IP Profiles

Lightboard Lessons: The BIG-IP Profiles

BIG-IP can manage application-specific network traffic in a variety of ways, depending on the protocols and services being used. On BIG-IP, Profiles are a set of tools that you can use to intelligently control the behavior of that traffic.

In this Lightboard Lesson, I light up the BIG-IP Profiles. What they are, what they do and why you should care.



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Related:

• Lightboard Lessons: BIG-IP Basic Nomenclature
• Lightboard Lessons: Device Services Clustering

Lightboard Lessons: IoT on BIG-IP

As more organizations deploy IoT applications in their data centers and clouds, they're going to need their ADC to understand the unique protocols these devices use to communicate.

In this Lightboard Lesson, I light up how IoT protocol MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) works on BIG-IP v13. iRules allow you to do Topic based load balancing along with sensor authentication. And if you missed it, here is the #LBL on What is MQTT?



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Related:

• Lightboard Lessons: What is MQTT?
• Security Trends in 2016: Securing the Internet of Things
• The Intruders of Things
• The IoT Ready Platform
• Using F5 BIG-IP with IBM MessageSight

Lightboard Lessons: What is MQTT?

The mad dash to connect virtually every noun to the internet or The Internet of Things, is creating a massive M2M network for all the devices, systems, sensors and actuators to connect & communicate on the Internet.

With that, they need a communications protocol to understand each other. One of those is Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT). MQTT is a “subscribe and publish” messaging protocol designed for lightweight machine-to-machine (or IoT) communications.

In this episode of Lightboard Lessons, I light up how MQTT works.



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Related:

• IoT Ready Infrastructure
• IoT Effect on Applications
• IoT Influence on Society
• What are These "Things?
• The Intruders of Things

Lightboard Lessons: SSO to Legacy Web Applications

IT organizations have a simple goal: make it easy for workers to access all their work applications from any device. But that simple goal becomes complicated when new apps and old, legacy applications do not authenticate in the same way.

In this Lightboard Lesson, I draw out how VMware and F5 helps remove these complexities and enable productive, any-device app access. By enabling secure SSO to Kerberos constrained delegation (KCD) and header-based authentication apps, VMware Workspace ONE and F5 BIG-IP APM help workers securely access all the apps they need—mobile, cloud and legacy—on any device anywhere.



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Related:

• Single Sign-On (SSO) to Legacy Apps Using BIG-IP & VMware Workspace ONE
• Simple & Secure Access to Legacy Enterprise Applications (pdf)
• Lightboard Lessons Playlist

Lightboard Lessons: BIG-IP in Hybrid Environments

A hybrid infrastructure allows organizations to distribute their applications when it makes sense and provide global fault tolerance to the system overall. Depending on how an organization’s disaster recovery infrastructure is designed, this can be an active site, a hot-standby, some leased hosting space, a cloud provider or some other contained compute location. As soon as that server, application, or even location starts to have trouble, organizations can seamlessly maneuver around the issue and continue to deliver their applications.

Driven by applications and workloads, a hybrid environment is a technology strategy to integrate the mix of on premise and off-premise data compute resources. In this Lightboard Lesson, I explain how BIG-IP can help facilitate hybrid infrastructures.


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Related:

• Highly Available Hybrid
• Application Availability Between Hybrid Data Centers

Lightboard Lessons: Secure & Optimize VDI

Virtualization continues to impact the enterprise and how IT delivers services to meet business needs. Desktop Virtualization (VDI) offers employees anywhere, anytime, flexible access to their desktops whether they are at home, on the road, in the office or on a mobile device. In this edition of Lightboard Lessons, I show how BIG-IP can secure, optimize and consolidate your VMware Horizon View environment, providing a secure front end access layer for VMware’s VDI infrastructure.

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Related:

• Simplify VMware View Deployments

Lightboard Lessons: DNS Scalability & Security

The Domain Name Service (DNS) is one of the most important components in networking infrastructure, enabling users and services to access applications by translating URLs (names) into IP addresses (numbers). Because every icon and URL and all embedded content on a website requires a DNS lookup, loading complex sites necessitates hundreds of DNS queries.

DNS lookups has exploded in recent years with mobile, IoT and the applications to support the growth. It is also a vulnerable target. In my first Lightboard Lesson, I show you how to scale, secure and consolidate your DNS infrastructure.



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Related:

• The Dangerous Game of DNS
• The DNS of Things
• Is 2016 Half Empty or Half Full?