While there are many legitimate uses for bots—customer support chats, search engine crawlers, and any number of single-task automata—these little computer programs are just as often used for more sinister purposes. Bots are cheap and simple means for attempting to infect user devices or IoT (Internet of Things) systems to take control of their resources, attempting to steal identity information to take over accounts, or even trying to outright steal digital content.
Today, malicious bots are launched in droves to attack our mobile devices and apps where most of our online activity happens. Unfortunately for developers of mobile apps, many techniques used by traditional bot-defense solutions are not supported by native mobile apps. As a result, if developers do not take precautions, their back-end mobile API components can be exposed to automated attacks such as content scraping, denial of service (DOS), credential stuffing, fake account creation, and a host of others.
Battling mobile bots is precisely why the F5 Bot Defense Mobile SDK was created. This SDK extends the robust bot-protection capabilities of F5 Bot Defense to mobile applications in order to defend against bots, vulnerability scanners, content scraping, and other automated attack vectors. F5 Bot Defense determines in real-time if an application request is from a non-human automated source and then takes an enterprise-specified action, such as blocking, redirecting, or flagging the request. This powerful solution is designed to block nefarious bot traffic before it reaches your application servers and data.
Through our close partnership with Promon, integrating the F5 Bot Defense Mobile SDK into your apps is done simply and quickly. In addition, the company’s flagship product, Promon SHIELD™, enables its own set of comprehensive in-app protections against attempts to spoof your app, tamper with its security controls or perform other nefarious activities. Together, F5 Bot Defense Mobile SDK and Promon SHIELD deliver thoroughly comprehensive protection.
For DevOps teams, integrating F5 Bot Defense into mobile apps could not be simpler. Android and iOS apps can be quickly secured without touching app code in minutes using Promon’s no-code, hassle-free SDK integration platform. Once integrated, F5 Bot Defense sifts through the business logic, event flows and data flows of the app and then binds itself to the existing code. Once secured, the app is immediately ready for distribution via public app stores.
Using the Promon SDK Integrator, developers can protect a mobile application in two straightforward steps:
A new app binary with all the features of F5 Bot Defense Mobile SDK is generated in minutes. Simply sign the new app and deploy it using existing workflows.
A Mobile app is a prime target for attack because it is so ubiquitous and has been traditionally difficult to secure. Software Development Kits (SDKs) such as the F5 Bot Defense Mobile SDK eliminate that difficulty and enable app developers to quickly integrate critical security features into their code—without having to write additional code themselves.
Promon’s self-service, no-code integration platform allows anyone to complete the integration of powerful mobile services, standards, vendors, SDKs and APIs in security, authentication, access, mobility, mobile threat, analytics and more. For F5 customers, this means you can leverage your existing investment in bot-protection to benefit your Android and iOS apps as well.
Press Release: Promon announces partnership with F5 to simplify mobile SDK integration
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This article contains references to Shape Security related offerings including Shape Enterprise Defense. Shape Security was acquired by F5 and many of the products and offerings are currently undergoing a rebranding effort.