Boost Efficiency and Security with F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager

Rachel Zabawa

When protecting your data center, every connection is a potential doorway to cyberattack. What is keeping hackers from breaking through to your defenses? The Internet enables anyone to attack your network, and where cybersecurity risks abound, the stakes are high. The game of staying one step ahead of inbound threats never ends.

Many enterprise companies that operate data centers today still struggle with their cybersecurity defenses. In particular, many find that the plethora of inbound threats are an on-going challenge. Enterprises and service providers struggle to keep pace with evolving inbound threats, service providers and telecoms have to protect their telecom infrastructure in addition to the enterprise aspects of their network.

Protect against inbound threats

Inbound threats typically refer to potential dangers or risks that come from outside a system or organization. These can include various types of cyberthreats, such as malware, phishing attacks, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In the context of cybersecurity, inbound threats are often managed through a combination of firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and other security measures designed to monitor and control incoming traffic and activities. F5 understands the intricacies of these threats and has been a primary provider of security solutions to service providers for over 20 years.

To protect against such threats, most enterprises rely on a stateful firewall that blocks everything by default unless explicitly allowed. (A stateful firewall makes decisions on a connection basis, not just per-packet.) In contrast, F5 from its foundation has understood inbound threats and focused on SSL encryption and HTTP protection early in its development. F5 started working on API security (API security is advanced HTTP security) in the early 2000s, and soon after introduced its Web Application Firewall (WAF) product followed by F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM).

BIG-IP AFM, an F5 BIG-IP TMOS module, is a high-performance network security solution that is designed to protect applications and infrastructure. It provides advanced features for managing and controlling network traffic, helping to protect against a variety of cyberthreats. BIG-IP AFM includes functionalities such as traffic filtering, intrusion prevention, application control, network and protocol distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection, address translation, logging and reporting, and integration with other security tools.

BIG-IP AFM enhances the security and manageability of network environments by providing advanced traffic control, threat detection, segmentation, and threat mitigation features. BIG-IP AFM is also a staple product used by many service providers, defending their core network infrastructure that enables them to provide various consumer and enterprise-facing services.

Filter out malicious traffic

Companies often connect to an external DNS resource, which translates website domain names into numeric IP addresses that servers can use to identify websites and devices connected to the Internet. However, this DNS traffic leaves the originating network open to countless DNS attacks.

But with BIG-IP AFM, managing DNS traffic is simple. In the context of Layer 7, BIG-IP AFM provides fine-grained control over traffic based on the application data and user behavior. Simply turn on protocol validation and any poorly formatted DNS DDoS features will filter out any poorly formatted DNS requests or attacks targeting DNS servers without impacting Layer 7 resources. BIG-IP AFM simply cuts out DNS garbage, thereby freeing up DNS server processing and network bandwidth. This improves application responsiveness but does so in a scalable and reliable way to protect against any number of different attacks. By incorporating DDoS and protocol level mitigation controls into a firewall, BIG-IP AFM provides a comprehensive approach to securing applications, ensuring that both the network and the application availability are protected from sophisticated threats.

The best part of this? It’s low-cost efficiency.

In the context of protocol security, AFM delivers fine-grained control over traffic based on application data and user behavior.

Here's how BIG-IP AFM works:

1. Deep Packet Inspection (DPI): BIG-IP AFM inspects the entire packet, including the data payload, to understand the application-specific details. This allows it to make security decisions based on the content of the traffic, not just the headers.
2. Application protocol awareness: BIG-IP AFM can recognize and enforce policies based on specific application protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and others. This allows it to apply different rules depending on the type of application traffic it is handling.
3. Intrusion detection and prevention: BIG-IP AFM supports many protocols and can filter requests that do not conform to the protocol or requests that match signatures of malicious attacks.
4. Mitigating network layer attacks: BIG-IP AFM helps protect against a variety of network-layer DDoS attacks such as floods, sweeps and malformed packets. By analyzing the protocol data, AFM can detect and block malicious activities.
5. Rate limiting and traffic shaping: BIG-IP AFM can enforce rate limits on specific types of application traffic to prevent abuse and ensure fair usage of resources. This is useful for mitigating DDoS attacks that target the application layer by overwhelming it with requests.
6. Logging and reporting: BIG-IP AFM provides detailed logs and reports about traffic and any security events, which helps in monitoring, auditing, and forensic analysis.

BIG-IP AFM operates from Layers 2 to 7, providing a comprehensive approach to securing applications and their data centers, ensuring that both network and application data are protected from sophisticated threats. And by leveraging BIG-IP AFM capabilities in ways similar to service providers, enterprise customers can enhance their security posture, reduce risk, and ensure business continuity in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

Do you need service-provider level security services at the enterprise level? To learn more, please go to the BIG-IP AFM web page on F5.com, or get a free trial of BIG-IP AFM here.

About the Author

Rachel Zabawa

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