F5 Adds To Portfolio With $1B Shape Security Acquisition

To add protection from targeted fraud, automated attacks and botnets to its portfolio of application services, F5 will acquire fraud and abuse prevention company Shape Security. The two companies announced a deal in which F5 will buy all of Shape’s issued and outstanding shares for a total enterprise value of roughly $1 billion in cash, subject to specific adjustments, according to an announcement.

The deal joins together the expertise of F5 in protecting applications through multi-cloud environments with the fraud and abuse prevention capabilities of Shape. The two companies together “offer organizations comprehensive, end-to-end application security, potentially saving billions of dollars lost to fraud, reputational damage, and costly disruptions to critical online services,” per the announcement.

F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou said in the announcement, “We know from the companies we work with that applications are critical to running their business. To drive maximum business value and the best experiences for their customers, these apps need to perform flawlessly while protecting data security and user privacy. When a website or application experience is degraded by web fraud and abuse, the result is lost revenue, lost brand equity, and customers jumping ship to the competition.”

Shape, for its part, protects the biggest airlines, retailers, government agencies and banks with complex fraud, abuse and bot defense. Shape, in particular, protects against credential stuffing attacks in which cybercriminals take over online accounts with stolen passwords from third-party data breaches. Shape has created a platform that taps into machine learning and artificial intelligence and supported by cloud-based analytics to guard against attacks that skirt other fraud and security controls.

The application protection platform of Shape evaluates the data flow from a user into an application. It harnesses analytics based on the cloud to tell the good traffic apart from the bad traffic. According to the announcement, “With F5’s location in the data flow of traffic in over 80% of Fortune 500 application infrastructures, F5 provides the ideal insertion point for Shape’s security services.”