Product Overview: Threat Stack (Now F5 Distributed Cloud App Infrastructure Protection – AIP)
Threat Stack, now rebranded as F5 Distributed Cloud App Infrastructure Protection (AIP), is a comprehensive cloud workload security solution designed to protect and secure cloud-native infrastructure. This SaaS-based platform is tailored to help organizations identify, detect, and respond to various threats, vulnerabilities, and risks within their cloud deployments.
Key Functionality
- Real-Time Threat Detection: Threat Stack combines rules-based behavioral monitoring with supervised machine learning to detect threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks in real-time across the entire infrastructure stack. This includes cloud provider APIs, virtual machine instances, containers, and Kubernetes environments.
- Full-Stack Telemetry: The platform collects, normalizes, and analyzes a vast amount of data (over 60 billion events per day) from customer cloud infrastructure and applications. This rich telemetry is used to train machine learning models, enabling the detection of anomalous behavior and unknown threats.
- Host Intrusion Detection and File Integrity Monitoring: At its core, Threat Stack features host-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and File Integrity Monitoring (FIM), which monitor for internal and external threats and track changes to critical files and system configurations.
- Container and Cloud Infrastructure Security: The platform provides robust security for containerized environments and cloud infrastructure, including AWS Infrastructure Control Plane Monitoring. This ensures comprehensive protection across all layers of the cloud stack.
- Regulatory Compliance: Threat Stack includes pre-built compliance rule sets to help organizations meet various regulatory requirements. It provides the necessary information for auditors and simplifies the compliance process.
- Vulnerability Assessment and Threat Intelligence: The platform offers vulnerability assessment capabilities and correlates threat intelligence data to provide a holistic view of the security posture. This helps in identifying and prioritizing high-severity threats.
- Enhanced Alert Context and Visualization: The updated platform includes advanced alert context functionality, which provides meaningful data, visualizations, and trend graphs to guide security investigations. This reduces the mean-time-to-know (MTTK) and helps security teams prioritize and investigate alerts more efficiently.
- Human-Led Security Operations: Threat Stack Insight (now Distributed Cloud AIP Insights) and Threat Stack Oversight (now Distributed Cloud AIP Managed Security Services) offer 24/7/365 monitoring and response services led by human security experts. This ensures continuous security oversight and rapid response to security incidents.
Integration and Operational Efficiency
Threat Stack integrates seamlessly with various tools and platforms, including configuration management, chatops, and containerization tools. This integration supports a DevOps mindset, allowing teams to move quickly without security becoming a bottleneck. The platform manages all back-end security operations from a single interface, minimizing resource consumption (typically 1-3% CPU usage) and eliminating the need for additional instances to support the security solution.
In summary, Threat Stack, now part of F5 Distributed Cloud Services, is a powerful cloud security platform that leverages a combination of rules, machine learning, and human expertise to provide comprehensive protection, compliance, and operational efficiency for cloud-native infrastructures.