Cequence Security vs Cloudflare Bot Management comparison

Cequence, a pioneer in API security and bot management, is the only solution that delivers Unified API Protection (UAP), uniting discovery, compliance, and protection across all internal and external APIs to defend organizations against attacks, business logic abuse, and fraud. Needing less than 15 minutes to onboard an API without requiring any instrumentation, SDK, or JavaScript integration, the flexible deployment model supports SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid installations. Cequence solutions scale to handle the most demanding government, Fortune and Global 500 organizations, securing more than 8 billion daily API interactions and protecting more than 3 billion user accounts.

Cequence Unified API Protection Platform

The Cequence Unified API Protection (UAP) platform enables security teams to manage through the entire API protection lifecycle that includes support for discover, comply, and protect stages that defend against attackers and eliminates unknown and unmitigated API security risks. The Cequence UAP platform provides three integral components, API Spyder, API Sentinel, and API Spartan that target every stage of the API protection lifecycle, ensuring that customers have one platform to address all their API security issues.

API Spyder (Discover)

Cequence UAP starts with first understanding your API attack surface through API Spyder which discovers your external APIs across managed and unmanaged API infrastructure. This allows security teams to ensure that unmanaged APIs are brought under management to confirm they do not have security risks and have the proper API protection enabled. Once deployed, API Spyder provides a continuous mechanism to surface unmanaged shadow APIs that are newly implemented by internal departments but never notify the security team of their existence.

API Sentinel (Comply)

API Sentinel, a security posture management product enables security teams and development teams to work collaboratively to directly address surfaced security issues within your runtime APIs that could potentially lead to an API exploit. It can discover whether your APIs conform to Open API specifications, adhere to security and governance best practices, and test your pre-production APIs for vulnerabilities. API Sentinel lays the groundwork to ensure that you are fully aware of the risks inherent in your API applications and enables you to remediate critical security issues before they are exploited by an attacker.

API Spartan (Protect)

Finally, API Spartan offers real-time detection and mitigation of automated threats and attacks, including those that are API-specific. API Spartan is powered by an ML-based analytics engine that can determine in real time if application transactions are from malicious or legitimate end users. It can mitigate a wide variety of cyberattacks that include online fraud, business logic attacks, exploits, automated bot activity, and OWASP API Top 10 attacks.

Cloudflare Bot Management is a suite of tools and services provided by Cloudflare, a company specializing in cybersecurity and performance solutions for websites and applications. Bot Management helps website owners identify, analyze, and manage automated bot traffic to their websites.

Bots are automated software programs that perform various tasks on the internet. While some of them serve legitimate purposes like search engine crawlers, others can be malicious and engage in activities like web scraping, content scraping, brute force attacks, account takeover attempts, and more. Such bot activities can harm websites by consuming server resources, causing performance issues, stealing content, or compromising user accounts.

Cloudflare Bot Management employs a range of techniques and technologies to detect and mitigate bot traffic. It combines behavioral analysis, machine learning algorithms, and collective intelligence from the vast network of websites using Cloudflare services to identify and distinguish between human visitors and bots.

Cloudflare Bot Management Features

Some of the features of Cloudflare Bot Management are:

• Simple Deployment: Cloudflare Bot Management can be deployed quickly and easily without complex configuration or maintenance. It offers out-of-the-box recommendations for managing bots, eliminating the need for third-party JavaScript instrumentation.

• Lowest Latency: Users are provided with ultra-low latency bot defenses, with a median latency of 0.3 milliseconds or less. This ensures that applications remain fast and responsive even while mitigating bot traffic.

• Rich Analytics and Logs: With Bot Analytics, website owners can improve their security posture by understanding, analyzing, and learning from automated traffic. The solution offers comprehensive dashboards and allows for the correlation of bot management traffic logs with other data sources using third-party tools like SIEMs or business intelligence applications.

• Control and Configurability: Cloudflare Bot Management offers extensive control and configurability options. Users can fine-tune bot management rules based on path or URI patterns, request methods, score sensitivities, and mitigation methods. A visual rule builder and pattern-matching rules provide flexibility in defining custom rules.

• Sophisticated Protection Against Bad Bots: The solution employs advanced techniques such as behavioral analysis, machine learning, and fingerprinting to accurately identify and protect against bad bots. This ensures robust defense against a wide range of bot threats.

• Threat Intelligence At-Scale: Cloudflare utilizes a vast and diverse volume of globally distributed data for accurate bot identification. By leveraging behavioral analysis, machine learning, and fingerprinting, Cloudflare applies threat intelligence at scale to effectively detect and mitigate bot traffic.

• Integrated Security and Performance: The solution seamlessly integrates with other Cloudflare products such as Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, and Content Delivery Network (CDN). This integration enhances overall security, user experience, and performance.

• Automatic Allowlists: The solution allows the inclusion of good bots, such as those belonging to search engines, while effectively preventing malicious traffic. This ensures that legitimate bots can access the website while keeping malicious bots at bay.

• Mobile App and API Protection: Cloudflare Bot Management extends its protection to mobile applications, safeguarding against impersonation and emulation attacks without requiring a mobile SDK. Additionally, it protects APIs accessed through web browsers.

• Configuration Flexibility: Users are provided with granular rules, user-defined mitigations, and unique actions beyond the industry standard. Users can define custom actions like rendering a mock login or alternative pricing page to outsmart and thwart bots.

Cloudflare Bot Management Benefits

Cloudflare Bot Management offers the following benefits:

• Simplified deployment and management

• Ultra-low latency bot defenses

• Improved security posture

• Enhanced visibility and analytics

• Customizable control and configurability

• Sophisticated protection against bad bots

• Accurate bot identification with threat intelligence at scale

• Integrated security and performance

• Instant protection without complex injections or SDKs

• Automatic allowlisting for good bots

• Mobile app and API protection

• Configuration flexibility with granular rules and unique actions