Background
AWS WAF for DDoS attack prevention
A healthcare client needed a DDoS attack prevention solution. AWS WAF provided them with additional static and dynamic application-level security. WAF also provided them with easy-to-use Web ACL bundles which were pretested security rules they could easily deploy or undeployed as needed.
Challenge
With the gradual growth of the user base from the US, Canada, and Europe, the client looked ahead to the possible security challenges around HTTP and DDoS attacks which could render the client’s website and application useless. With the current low usage, the client had already seen some malicious activity from many undesirable geo-locations from across the globe.
The company needed complete security and protection from attacks such as cross-site scripting, SQL injections, cross-site request forgery, brute-force attacks, and Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF), to name a few.
The client team did everything possible within their available skill set to ensure that they are monitoring the network for all of the above vulnerabilities, but nothing was automated as the team did not have the expertise to implement an automated solution for the challenge at hand.
Solution: AWS WAF Web Application Firewall
After a careful review of all available tools to automate the security, the client decided to implement AWS Web-Application Firewall (WAF) to secure their applications and related assets. Also check out the case study on Amazon WAF – Web Application Security.
Some of the key benefits of implementing Amazon WAF for client were listed as:
- Protection against SQL injection
- Easily configurable traffic rules that help filter web-traffic
- Improved web traffic visibility and alert generation
- Ability to capture IP addresses, geo-locations from web traffic and make decisions based on it
- No more manual monitoring of traffic to ensure high up-time (developers can sleep easy now)
- Security integrated with DevOps practices to make better security-related decisions
Some of the other services used to enhance AWS WAF usage are AWS CloudFront and AWS CloudWatch
Result
In addition to saving our client application from DDoS attacheks, implementation of WAF provided numerous other benefits of which some are as follows:
Faster incident response time
Fewer attacks to worry about as the company’s footprint grows to other geo-locations
Lower monitoring costs
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