BIG-IP ASM Specialist: web application security

10 Sub-Modules | 28 Lessons

• The effects of common attacks on web applications (how ASM affects clients and applications in transparent and blocking mode, and the OWASP Top Ten summarised properly)

• How specific policies mitigate specific attacks (reading an iRule or LTM policy that maps traffic to an ASM policy, and the trade-off between security, manageability, false positives and performance)

• Determining policy features and granularity from requirements (turning an application security requirement into technical tasks)

• Choosing the deployment method (web services, vulnerability scanner, templates, rapid deployment)

• The automatic policy builder lifecycle (the profiles it needs, and anomaly detection for DoS, brute force, web scraping and proactive bot defence)

• Reviewing and evaluating policy settings from what ASM has gathered (attack signatures, DataGuard, entities, initial policy building settings)

• Policy structure for policy elements (URLs, parameters, file types, headers, sessions and logins, content profiles, CSRF protection, anomaly detection, DataGuard, proactive bot defence)

• The deployment wizard (its options and their consequences, and selecting the right deployment model for the business requirement)

• Logging options (remote logger specifications: ports, log types, formats, address)

• The attack signature lifecycle (staging, enforcement readiness period, and choosing the right signatures or signature sets)

5 Sub-Modules | 15 Lessons

• The implications of a policy change on both the security and the functionality of the application

• Integrating third party vulnerability scan output with ASM (refining policy elements from the results, and managing policies with import, export, merge and revert)

• Evaluating whether the rules actually mitigate the violations they are supposed to

• Adjusting a policy from the available data (tuning for performance, including wildcards used deliberately rather than lazily)

• Policy management functions (policy status, the violation types that exist in ASM, merging and differentiating between policies)

4 Sub-Modules | 12 Lessons

• Interpreting log entries to refine the policy (examining traffic violations, determining whether attack traffic got through, removing false positives, and locating violations reported by users and developers)

• Identifying trends from an ASM report (each major violation category and how ASM detects the exploit, plus generating reports covering anomaly statistics, charts, requests and PCI compliance status)

• Choosing the appropriate mitigation for a given attack or vulnerability, and adapting the policy to it

• Deciding whether the mitigation worked (choosing a user-defined attack signature that responds to the specific traffic)

6 Sub-Modules | 18 Lessons

• Policy performance issues and their mitigation (performance graphs and statistics read alongside the configuration, and the effect of Guaranteed Logging)

• The impact of learning, alarm and blocking settings on enforcement (confirming the policy is actually inspecting and parsing the traffic)

• Examining policy objects to explain why traffic is or is not generating violations (Security Event Logs against the logging profile assigned to the virtual server)

• ASM performance metrics (the impact of ASM iRules, and of traffic spikes, with the mitigation options available)

• System performance issues correlated with policy changes (security policy history read against system performance graphs)

• ASM specific user roles and their permissions

Yes. Passing 303 earns F5 Certified Technology Specialist, BIG-IP ASM. It is a single exam, unlike the LTM track which needs both 301a and 301b.

Yes. F5 Certified Administrator, BIG-IP (F5-CA) is required before any 3xx specialist exam. Since May 2025 that credential is earned by passing five short exams, F5CAB1 through F5CAB5, rather than the old 201.

Yes. Demonstrations cover the deployment wizard, automatic policy builder, signature staging and enforcement readiness, DataGuard, CSRF protection and bot defence, all in the GUI and TMSH. Tuning is shown live against real traffic, because removing a false positive without opening a hole is a judgement call and the exam treats it as one.

Yes, and the course goes further than the blueprint requires here. I have thirty years in application development and six years as an OWASP member, so each attack category is explained from the application side first: what the code does wrong, what the attacker sends, and only then what the ASM policy does about it. The blueprint asks you to summarise the OWASP Top Ten. You will understand it rather than memorise it.

Another specialist certification, depending on where your work sits: 301a and 301b (LTM), 302 (DNS) or 304 (APM). ASM is a natural companion to the 401 Security Solutions Expert track, though that requires LTM specifically as its prerequisite.