App shielding

How to provide comprehensive app protection with Promon and F5

Promon has partnered with the industry’s leading multi-cloud application security and delivery company, F5, to simplify mobile SDK integration and provide world-leading app shielding to their customers.

Cybercriminals are targeting the mobile channel more aggressively than ever before, and app developers must take a proactive approach to app security to combat this new aggression. The number of mobile malware attacking users of mobile devices is increasing rapidly each year. At the same time, malicious apps continue to be distributed on 3rd party app stores and frequently slip under the radar on the official app stores.

Tackling the multi-faceted challenge of developing a successful mobile app is no easy feat, and developers must contend with pressures from every direction. Getting an app built, tested, and published as quickly as possible is imperative. However, app protection cannot be overlooked in the rush to market.

Bots are autonomous programs designed to generate requests that mimic real users at scale. Companies of every size can be impacted by bot attacks that attempt to infiltrate through account takeover (ATO), compromised credentials, unauthorized scraping, and more. XC Bot Defense was created to battle these bots and mitigate the damage they can cause.

As Raymond Pompon at F5 Labs has said, “…cyberattacks are the easiest and most untraceable way to deny, disrupt, degrade, or destroy an organization.” And the damage from these attacks is very real:

  • At more than 25 percent, the largest category of data breaches involves access modalities (i.e., phishing, brute force, credential stuffing, and the like).
  • Online fraud losses are projected to exceed $48 billion per year by 2023.
  • E-commerce, airline ticketing, money transfer, and banking industries will cumulatively lose over $200 billion to online payment fraud between 2020 and 2024.
  • In 2019, web exploits constituted 87 percent of breaches in the retail sector alone, making retail the only sector in which web exploits were responsible for more than half of the known breaches.
  • One survey from Forrester reported that most respondents acknowledged “hundreds of hours of productivity lost to bot attack resolution.”
  • That same survey showed that 48 percent of respondents experienced a “loss of revenue because of shopping cart fraud/scraping/account takeover.”

Protect your apps — quickly and easily.

With this new F5 and Promon partnership, customers can quickly and easily implement the full functionality of XC Bot Defense for mobile apps through Promon’s no-code, hassle-free SDK integration platform. This means that Android and iOS apps can be secured within minutes without touching the app code. Once secured, the app is immediately ready for distribution via public app stores.

Bots are a primary means by which criminals and fraudsters try to infiltrate origin servers, with bot traffic often originating on compromised mobile devices or emulated endpoints. When F5 XC Bot Defense is integrated into the mobile app, customers have a powerful line of defense against this type of infiltration. Security at the mobile app is the first line of defense.

Customers can also benefit from the fact that in addition to quickly enabling XC Bot Defense, Promon SHIELD™ is also available to enable its own set of comprehensive app shielding solutions to spoof your app, tamper with its security controls, or perform other nefarious activities. Promon SHIELD™ is the leading app shielding solution in the market. It protects your code at rest (against reverse engineering, obfuscation, and repackaging) and during runtime (for comprehensive malware protection against trojans, code injection, hooking, overlay attacks, keylogging, debugging, and more). Accordingly, the combined and complementary solution makes it easy to protect both the server application, using XC Bot Defence, and the mobile app, using Promon SHIELD™.

F5 and Promon have partnered to deliver unique industry-leading mobile app security and app shielding. Through Promon’s SDK integrator, customers can now protect their mobile apps with F5’s Distributed Cloud Defense Mobile SDK within minutes. Not to mention that customers can easily add the leading app solution on the market, Promon SHIELD™️ to harden mobile apps at rest and protect against runtime attacks. The complemetary solution is a no-brainer for our joint customers who want to provide maximum protection at the origin with F5 and the mobile app with Promon.

Rupert young, head of product, fraud and risk at f5

Learn more in the companion blog post by F5

Want to know more about how to add multi-layered app shielding to your app?