OFX Use Case

CHALLENGE

OFX is an international financial transfer platform based in Sydney, Australia, that processes over $22 billion annually through its web application. Having recently completed a total migration to the cloud over a period of three years, OFX wanted to increase visibility and protection against Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) attacks and authentication abuse in its cloud-first microservices infrastructure.

Partners interact with the OFX platform via APIs that talk to microservices
internal to the OFX network. Tasked to build the security program and team,
Head of Digital Security Richard Lane wanted to ensure their microservices
weren’t implicitly trusting others and sought a product that would provide
visibility there. He wanted a solution that would prove easy to install, use, and effectively block malicious traffic automatically — including logins — without hand holding or causing production incidents.

SOLUTION

Deploying the Fastly Next-Gen WAF in their mid-tier environment with an agent on their web servers allowed OFX to “get into the guts of the application,” as Lane explains. “Fastly has provided a whole ton of visibility where we didn’t have it before.”

Engineering benefits without tradeoffs

Using the Fastly Next-Gen WAF web server module plugins that communicate with lightweight agents, the security team and cloud architect were able to deploy easily without taxing the engineering team and gain deep application
visibility. After installing the software in minutes, the security team used Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) to uncover application errors and address root causes more efficiently and effectively.

In addition, the quality assurance team uses the Fastly Next-Gen WAF monitoring via easy-to-consume dashboards as a part of their release protocols to catch any issues quickly. By seeing response anomaly patterns in the Fastly Next-Gen WAF, they’re able to ensure the applications’ RESTful APIs are functioning as expected.

Authentication defense with Power Rules

OFX wanted visibility into the origin IP and behavior of user logins to detect suspicious actors and patterns. After configuring the Fastly Next-Gen WAF Power Rules for successful and failed login attempts, they established a baseline for their normal authentication traffic. With a low risk tolerance and low traffic volume, OFX used Power Rules to create custom thresholds to alert and block malicious authentication traffic aggressively whenever it deviates from normal behavior, and they haven’t experienced any false positives.

Penetration testing visibility and validation

Another Power Rules use case was to gain visibility for penetration testing to understand the breadth and range of testing, which also helped to validate the Fastly Next-Gen WAF effectiveness during the initial evaluation. With toggles in the Fastly Next-Gen WAF console UI to easily turn on or off detection against particular pen test sources, they confirmed the Fastly Next-Gen WAF would have blocked the pen testers’ attempts.