Security takes back seat to performance among IT decision-makers

Seventy-five percent of information technology decision-makers surveyed by F5 for this year's State of Application Strategy Report have prioritized performance over security, noting that certain safety defenses are being turned off should they impact system speeds, SiliconAngle reports. The findings should prompt increased action in security, according to F5 Executive Vice President of Security and Distributed Cloud Haiyan Song. "We have got to do better, because security shouldn't be the one that prevents or adds friction to what the business wants to do," said Song. Moreover, automated bots looking to achieve matching credentials have accounted for more than 90% of organizations' incoming traffic, with 99% of a social networking site's login traffic attributed to malicious bots. F5 Global Head of Intelligence Dan Woods said that organizations have been failing to avert malicious accounts due to their highly distributed nature. "Security teams will typically identify the attack coming from the top 100 or 1,500 noisiest IP [addresses], but they miss the long tail of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of IP [addresses] that are only used one or two times," Woods added.