AWS WAF sits in front of your web servers to protect them from malicious traffic. Analyzing traffic for patterns helps prevent attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
Managed rules allow you to deploy and update security policies in less than a minute without additional software deployment or DNS configuration. Moreover, these rules are automatically updated to protect you against new web application threats.
1. Improved Security
Web applications have helped advance human life by leaps and bounds. It has allowed us to do things like video chat with friends and family or check our bank balances anytime. Unfortunately, hackers and malicious actors also use these technologies to do bad things. Luckily, AWS WAF is one of the best security tools for web application servers that protect against attacks.
With AWS WAF, you can configure rules that allow, block, or monitor (count) web requests based on conditions such as IP addresses, HTTP headers, and custom URLs. This helps protect web apps from common attack patterns such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
It can be deployed in minutes and has minimal impact on incoming traffic. It tightly integrates with AWS, API Gateway, and AppSync to secure web content. It even supports custom origins outside of AWS.
With a few clicks, you can protect your apps from bot attacks using the Bot Control managed rule group. This prevents terrible bots from consuming resources, distorting data, or creating disruption. It also prevents account takeover fraud by blocking login attempts with compromising credentials.
2. Enhanced Performance
In the modern world, technology has developed leaps and bounds. We can now video chat with a loved one from across the globe and make payments with just a tap on our mobile devices. While these advancements have helped to improve our lives, they also present threats and attacks that we must be aware of.
In addition, the AWS web application firewall protects applications from web-based threats as an application firewall by allowing developers to create rules to filter incoming traffic to prevent malicious activity. This will help to ensure that your apps run smoothly and aren’t disrupted by hackers who want to steal data or take over your app.
Another benefit of AWS WAF is that it provides near real-time visibility into web traffic. This information can be accessed and used to create custom alarms that will notify you of any issues. The service is also scalable and will automatically scale to meet the demands of your web applications. It also has a pay-as-you-go model, so you only have to pay for what you use.
3. Reduced Downtime
AWS WAF enables you to block web attacks, including bad bots, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and remote file inclusion. It also protects against DDoS attacks that can disrupt service and make your infrastructure and applications vulnerable.
Using AWS WAF rules, you can configure the firewall to allow or block web traffic based on conditions that may include IP addresses, HTTP headers, and body and custom URI strings. It also helps you detect attacks that target application-layer vulnerabilities by analyzing traffic patterns, detecting anomalies, and monitoring the behavior of the firewall to identify and respond to emerging threats.
AWS WAF is easy to deploy and maintain, providing agile protection against web attacks and enabling you to reduce operational overhead. It integrates seamlessly with web applications deployed as part of a CDN solution, AWS API Gateway for APIs, and Application Load Balancer for web servers. It requires no additional software deployment or DNS configuration to get started. Its self-service model provides transparent pricing based on your daily web requests and the number of rules installed.
4. Ease of Deployment
AWS WAF is a fully managed service, so you don’t have to worry about installing and maintaining software. This makes it extremely easy to deploy and manage. AWS WAF’s rules are updated to reflect security insights and new threats. This eliminates the need to maintain a large and complex law set independently.
Using AWS WAF can also help you save money. It can protect against DDoS attacks at the application layer, which consume fewer resources than infrastructure attacks. In addition, it can help you control costs by blocking unneeded traffic, such as that from search engine crawlers and scraper programs that waste resources and create disruption on your website.
AWS WAF offers Bot Control, a managed rule group that helps block unwelcome bot traffic at the network edge. This can reduce operating and infrastructure costs by reducing the number of scrapers, scanners, and status monitors that consume excessive resources. This feature can also improve SEO and user experience by directing bots to a cached version of your site rather than the live pricing database.
5. Lower Cost
AWS WAF is cheaper than many protection services, as it is a pay-as-you-go solution that only charges for the web requests it processes. It also gives you real-time visibility into the raw request data to identify trends guide and anomalies in traffic patterns that indicate potential attacks.
With a low learning curve, you can quickly deploy rules and policies that block the most common attacks, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and bot traffic. Using AWS Firewall Manager, you can centrally manage your WAF rules to reduce operational overhead. The service also offers cost-saving IPS rules and enables you to meet compliance requirements quickly.
Final Words
WAF provides visibility and control over bad bots that may consume resources, distort data, or create disruption. The Bot Control managed rule group identifies and blocks common bad bots programmed to crawl or scrape websites, perform status checks, or submit meaningless data through online forms. This is a great way to protect your web applications from bad bots and allows you to spend more time developing your apps.