Subscribing and Using The AWS Shield Advanced For Higher Levels Of Protection Against Attacks Targeting The Apps

In this article, we’ll examine AWS Shield Advanced, which provides us with more customized protection against sophisticated (Layer 3 to 7) threats targeting our applications. We will learn to subscribe to, configure, and use it.

Topics we will cover:

1. What is WAF?
2. AWS WAF & Shield
3. AWS WAF
4. AWS Shield
4.1. AWS Shield Standard
4.2. AWS Shield Advanced
5. Subscribing and Using The AWS Shield Advanced
6. As a result
7. Next post: “AWS Best Practices for DDoS Mitigation and Security Techniques”
8. References

1. What is WAF?

When a website is online, it can become the target of many different types of attacks aimed at causing trouble and taking the site offline. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are a very common problem. Protection against DDoS attacks is of primary importance for your internet-facing applications. It overloads IT resources with malicious traffic where they cannot function properly. (1)

While creating an environment for the application, it’s equally important to secure the application and protect the data. Otherwise, If not properly secured, the application data might get into the wrong hands as in the case of the Capital One incident. Capital One hosted a Web Application on EC2 and it was not secured properly. An ex-AWS employee was able to exploit this vulnerability and download reams of customer data from S3. Later it was found that the data from 30 other organizations were also downloaded from AWS (2). Capital One used AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) to protect the Web Application, but it was not configured properly and the hacker was able to get the access to the data in S3 and download it. If you want to learn more about the case of the Capital One incident, you can check out this article;