If you are new to AWS WAF and are interested in learning how to mitigate bot traffic by implementing Challenge actions in your AWS WAF custom rules, here is a basic, cost-effective way of using this action to help you reduce the impact of bot traffic in your applications …

The betting and gaming industry has grown into a data-rich landscape that presents an enticing target for sophisticated bots. The sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) that is collected and the financial data involved in betting and in-game economies is especially valuable. Microtransactions and in-game purchases are frequently targeted, making …

If you have a customer facing application, you might want to enable self-service sign-up, which allows potential customers on the internet to create an account and gain access to your applications. While it’s necessary to allow valid users to sign up to your application, self-service options can open …

Generative AI–based applications have grown in popularity in the last couple of years. Applications built with large language models (LLMs) have the potential to increase the value companies bring to their customers. In this blog post, we dive deep into network perimeter protection for generative AI applications. We …

Most organizations prioritize protecting their web applications that are exposed to the internet. Using the AWS WAF service, you can create rules to control bot traffic, help prevent account takeover fraud, and block common threat patterns such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS). Further, for those customers managing …

For many network security operators, protecting application uptime can be a time-consuming challenge of baselining network traffic, investigating suspicious senders, and determining how best to mitigate risks. Simplifying this process and understanding network security posture at all times is the goal of most IT organizations that are trying to …

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), security is our top priority. Security is deeply embedded into our culture, processes, and systems; it permeates everything we do. What does this mean for you? We believe customers can benefit from learning more about what AWS is doing to prevent and mitigate customer-impacting …

Every day across the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, we detect and successfully thwart hundreds of cyberattacks that might otherwise be disruptive and costly. These important but mostly unseen victories are achieved with a global network of sensors and an associated set of disruption tools. Using these capabilities …

You can now deploy AWS WAF managed rules as part of the Security Automations for AWS WAF solution. In this post, we show you how to get started and set up monitoring for this automated solution with additional recommendations. This article discusses AWS WAF, a service that assists you …

In 2017, AWS announced the release of Rate-based Rules for AWS WAF, a new rule type that helps protect websites and APIs from application-level threats such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, brute force log-in attempts, and bad bots. Rate-based rules track the rate of requests for each …

As Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers build new applications, APIs have been key to driving the adoption of these offerings. APIs simplify client integration and provide for efficient operations and management of applications by offering standard contracts for data exchange. APIs are also the front door to hosted applications …

Threat actors use sign-up pages and login pages to carry out account fraud, including taking unfair advantage of promotional and sign-up bonuses, publishing fake reviews, and spreading malware. In 2022, AWS released AWS WAF Fraud Control – Account Takeover Prevention (ATP) to help protect your application’s login page against …

In this post, we’ll share an automation pattern that you can use to automatically detect and block suspicious hosts that are attempting to access your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources. The automation will rely on Amazon GuardDuty to generate findings about the suspicious hosts, and then you can …

In November 2022, AWS introduced support for granular geographic (geo) match conditions in AWS WAF. This blog post demonstrates how you can use this new feature to customize your AWS WAF implementation and improve the security posture of your protected application. AWS WAF provides inline inspection of inbound traffic …

January 24, 2023: This post was republished to update the code, architecture, and narrative. September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. In this post, we’ll show you how to deploy a solution in your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account that …

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we shared an overview of some of the most important 2021 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security service and feature launches. In this follow-up, we’ll dive deep into additional launches that are important for security professionals to be aware of and understand …

Introduction A few years ago at Sydney Summit, I had an excellent question from one of our attendees. She asked me to help her design a cost-effective, reliable, and not overcomplicated solution for protection against simple bots for her web-facing resources on Amazon Web Services (AWS). I remember the …

This blog post shows you how to use the machine learning capabilities of Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) to detect and visualize anomalies in AWS WAF logs. AWS WAF logs are streamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Kinesis Data Firehose invokes an …

AWS Managed Rules for AWS WAF provides a group of rules created by AWS that can be used help protect you against common application vulnerabilities and other unwanted access to your systems without having to write your own rules. AWS Threat Research Team updates AWS Managed Rules to respond …

When your APIs are exposed on the internet, they naturally face unpredictable traffic. AWS WAF helps protect your application’s API against common web exploits, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting. In this blog post, you’ll learn how to automatically detect anomalies in the AWS WAF metrics …

In this post, we explain what the three most important AWS WAF rate-based rules are for proactively protecting your web applications against common HTTP flood events, and how to implement these rules. We share what the Shield Response Team (SRT) has learned from helping customers respond to HTTP floods …

Note: This blog post describes how to automatically update AWS WAF IP sets with the most recent AWS IP ranges for AWS services. This related blog post describes how to perform a similar update for Amazon CloudFront IP ranges that are used in VPC Security Groups. You can use …

In March 2021, AWS introduced support for custom responses and request header insertion with AWS WAF. This blog post will demonstrate how you can use these new features to customize your AWS WAF solution to improve the user experience and security posture of your applications. HTTP response codes are …

AWS Shield is a managed service that protects applications that are running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) against external threats, such as bots and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Shield detects network and web application-layer volumetric events that may indicate a DDoS attack, web content scraping, or other …