F5 agreed to acquire Shape, a privately-held company supplying fraud and abuse prevention solutions, for approximately $1 billion in cash, subject to certain adjustments.
Shape provides protection from automated attacks, botnets, and targeted fraud. In particular, Shape defends against credential stuffing attacks, where cybercriminals use stolen passwords from third-party data breaches to take over other online accounts. Shape’s application protection platform evaluates the data flow from the user into the application and leverages highly sophisticated cloud-based analytics to discern good traffic from bad. 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. Together F5 and Shape will dramatically reduce the time and resources needed for organizations to deploy world-class online fraud and abuse protection.
F5 said the acquisition brings together its own expertise in protecting applications across multi-cloud environments with Shape’s fraud and abuse prevention capabilities to transform application security.
“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,” said F5 President and CEO, François Locoh-Donou.
“With Shape, we will deliver end-to-end application protection, which means revenue generating, brand-anchoring applications are protected from the point at which they are created through to the point where consumers interact with them—from code to customer,” continued Locoh-Donou.
“Since Shape’s inception, we observed a consistent pattern in customer after customer: the use of F5 technology to deliver and enable their applications,” said Derek Smith, co-founder and CEO of Shape. “Now, we look forward to the opportunity to deeply integrate into F5’s platform for application delivery and security—F5 provides the optimum traffic flow insertion point for Shape’s industry-leading online fraud and abuse prevention solutions.”
