When a company that protects the world’s largest networks gets breached, the ripple effects touch everyone. That’s exactly what happened with F5. A nation-state actor maintained long-term access to F5’s internal environment, exfiltrating source code and vulnerability intel—prompting an emergency U.S. federal directive for rapid patching across agencies. Even if your own F5 estate hasn’t shown indicators of compromise, the incident is a flashing red light for any organization still depending on appliance-centric remote access or castle-and-moat thinking.
What the F5 hack means for defenders
- Long dwell time + source code theft = durable attacker advantage. With development artifacts and vulnerability notes in hand, adversaries can accelerate exploit discovery—even if supply-chain tampering isn’t confirmed. That translates into a sustained period of heightened risk for anyone operating affected gear.
- Urgent, disruptive patch cycles. CISA’s emergency directive requires rapid upgrades and hardening for a broad swath of devices (BIG-IP iSeries/rSeries/F5OS/BIG-IP Next, etc.), creating scramble conditions for already-stretched IT teams. This will be an ongoing battle as new vulnerabilities become known.
- Appliance gravity hurts response. When access and security depend on fixed boxes and static PoPs, organizations face windows of exposure between disclosure and remediation—and heavy change-management every time a new CVE drops.
The lesson: move users, not perimeters
Incidents like these reinforce a core truth: perimeter-centric and appliance-bound models struggle against modern, fast-moving threats. It needs a shift-left Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) model to flip equation. This moves the model to identity, device posture, and per-app access—continuously evaluated—reducing blast radius and limiting lateral movement even if credentials or endpoints are compromised. Independent analysts have tracked this industry shift for years and continue to recommend ZTNA over VPN for precisely these reasons and the recent GigaOm CxO brief takes it further to give you the ultimate secure access.
Why Cloudbrink ZTNA is built for this moment (Security first)
Cloudbrink’s Personal SASE delivers shift-left ZTNA that doesn’t just secure access—it continuously hardens it, without hardware dependencies. Here’s how it specifically addresses the kinds of risks underscored by the F5 incident:
- Continuous trust with short-lived credentials
Cloudbrink enforces mutual TLS 1.3 with certificate rotation every eight hours, so trust is short-lived and automatically refreshed—dramatically shrinking the utility of any intercepted keys or stale posture states. - Identity + device posture + location for every request
Access is dynamically gated on who the user is, what the device’s health is, and where they’re connecting from—with real-time posture signals (including CrowdStrike Zero-Trust Assessment) shaping allow/deny decisions. That means a compromised endpoint can be cut off automatically—even mid-session. - Dynamic Invisible Network access to private apps
Private applications are never exposed to the internet. Users see only the specific apps they’re entitled to, over an encrypted, software-defined path—reducing discoverability and eliminating the “front-door” attack surface attackers often scout after a vendor breach. - Ephemeral, software-only edges—no appliances to patch
Cloudbrink’s FAST Edges are software-defined and temporary, spun up close to users and scaled on demand. There’s no hardware/uCPE to procure, rack, or emergency-patch—removing a big chunk of operational and supply-chain risk spotlighted by this event. - Standards-aligned, SDP-compliant architecture
Policy is enforced end-to-end with a software-defined perimeter model and last-generation bypass protections layered with modern security controls—meaning if an old access method fails open, your modern path still holds the line.
Bonus: Simplicity and speed (because security without usability won’t stick)
- Simplicity: One software-only service, one license, unified policy across SaaS, cloud, and private apps. A national insurance company onboarded 850 users in a few days, slashing support tickets after cutting over from legacy VPN stacks.
- Speed: The Brink Protocol and personal SD-WAN keep app performance LAN-like—even under packet loss—so you don’t trade security for productivity. Typically a user sees a 40%-400% increase in app performance but a Fortune 100 developer group saw up to 30× faster file transfers and eliminated ~300 ms of latency.
- Independent validation: GigaOm’s 2025 ZTNA Radar recognized Cloudbrink as a fast mover and innovation/platform leader, underscoring thier trajectory in both capability and execution.
Practical next steps if you’re running F5 today
- Follow the directives. Inventory all affected devices, patch to the latest releases, and apply hardening guidance per CISA advisories.
- Reduce appliance exposure. Move remote access away from internet-reachable gateways toward a high-performance ZTNA model like Cloudbrink where apps are hidden and access is per-app, per-user, per-device.
- Pilot Cloudbrink in parallel. Because deployment is software-only (no PoP hair-pinning, no boxes), you can stand up a pilot quickly—prove posture-driven access, performance under packet loss, and user experience improvements—then phase down legacy tunnels.
The bottom line
The F5 incident reinforces what many teams already feel: hardware-centric access is brittle under nation-state pressure. Cloudbrink’s security-first ZTNA gives you short-lived trust, continuous posture, hidden apps, and software-defined edges—so you can simplify operations, harden security, and speed up your users all at once.
