F5 BIG-IP ASM Certified Technology Specialist

As you will have realised, I’m writing a lot about load balancers lately. In fact, I’ve written 10 posts about F5 BIG-IP since April. This is due to the fact that my F5 Certified BIG-IP Administrator (F5-CA) certification is going to expire soon. Therefore, I was thinking how to renovate this certification and what was the best option for my job, my skills and my knowledge. Finally, I chose to study for the 303 – BIG-IP ASM Specialist v2 exam for the recertification process because I had already worked with Web Application Firewalls.

Two years ago, I studied for 101 - Application Delivery Fundamentals and 201 - TMOS Administration. I passed the exams with an score of 86 and 73 respectively. This is the entry level certification for F5 BIG-IP. Once I got the F5-CA certification, I could register for F5 Certified Technology Specialists (F5-CTS) certification where I could choose between LTM, DNS, ASM or APM. However, if I wanted to pass the F5 Certified Solution Expert (F5-CSE), first, I would have to achieve all CTS levels.

F5 Certification Program

I think the exam 303 – ASM Specialist is the best option for my recertification because I’ve already worked with Web Application Firewalls. In fact, I’ve had to talk about ASM module and show its features in marketing campaigns as well as I’ve delivered training courses and deployed demo and appliances for production environments. In addition, I’ve also worked with other manufactures such as AWS WAF or Fortinet FortiWeb. For this reason, my knowledge about WAF is not only limited to F5.

What have I been studying for the exam? First, I took the Getting Started with BIG-IP ASM course from F5 University. Next, I’ve had the lucky of taking a training course in ASM and I’ve done all the labs twice. I’ve also read the book I got from the training course as well as I read the BIG-IP ASM Operation Guide. Finally, I’ve read carefully the OWASP Top 10 to know and understand the most critical security risks to web application.

Although BIG-IP v13.1 has already been released, BIG-IP ASM exam is still from the old version 12.1, which is nice for people who has already worked with ASM but it’s undesirable for newbie who are learning for the first time about ASM because there has been some changes in the new version and, probably, they are going to deploy, configure and manage the last version, v13.1, in the future. It’s also important to highlight that the passing score is 57%, which is the lower passing score to get a F5-CTS. This is great!!

Exam descriptions and study materials

 

If you want to take the plunge to this certification, I would recommend you to read the next posts:

• Web Application Vulnerabilities
• Web Application Firewall
• XML and Web Services
• WebSockets
• OWASP Top 10
• F5 BIG-IP WAF
• What’s new in BIG-IP version 13.1
• WAF vs IPS
• Policy Tuning and Violations
• Positive Security Policy
• Cookie and HTTP Header Tampering
• Parameter Tampering Attacks
• Login Enforcement & Session Tracking
• Preventing Web Scraping
• Brute Force and Web Scraping

Regards my friends and keep studying!!