

DDoS attacks are malicious attacks on servers or network infrastructures that attempt to disrupt normal traffic. AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection tool for your AWS-based applications. While AWS WAF is a firewall that can protect you from multiple types of attacks and provide various options for whitelisting, AWS Shield is a single-purpose service. AWS WAF also allows you to create a rate-based rule to stop brute force HTTP flood attacks. Others are SQL injection attacks, prevented by using SQL injection match conditions, and cross-site scripting attacks (XSS attacks), prevented by cross-site scripting match conditions. The simplest type is an attack from a known IP address, which can be stopped by configuring an IP match condition. Charges are based on the number of access control lists (Web ACLs) that you create ($5.00 per month per web ACL, prorated hourly), the number of rules you have for each web ACL ($1.00 per month per rule), and the number of web requests you receive ($0.60 per 1 million requests).ĪWS WAF can be used to prevent a variety of attacks on your AWS environment. The pricing plan for AWS WAF is also quite simple. All you have to do is put your desired rules in place. There are no necessary deployments of any kind, you don’t need to install any software, and you don’t have to worry about keeping the firewall up-to-date. Because AWS is a fully managed service that eliminates all of your responsibilities, it is very easy to implement. These rules can be implemented on a per application basis to give you flexibility.ĪWS WAF was designed to be used with EC2, CloudFront, Application Load Balancer, and API Gateway. You can either use the security rules provided by AWS or configure your own. AWS Web Application FirewallĪWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) is a cloud firewall that uses various security rules to protect web applications running on AWS. Let’s examine those use cases, starting with AWS WAF. While these two services are both designed to keep your cloud environment safe, they were designed for different use cases. This article will look at three of these services-AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), AWS Shield, and AWS Firewall Manager-and explain why you should consider implementing them. Because most AWS services are very simple to use and don’t require management by a team of specialized employees, companies of all sizes can easily benefit from their use. No matter what you do to keep your own infrastructure and data safe, you can still be affected by the numerous flaws in the environments your business is running on, and it’s becoming more commonplace to hear about security breaches resulting from misconfigurations.įortunately, there are many services available to help you improve the overall security of your AWS environment. Over the past couple of years, security has become a high priority for most companies.
