All 7 AWS WAF & Shield questions
More in AWS WAF & Shield
What is AWS Shield, and what is the difference between Shield Standard and Shield Advanced? How do AWS WAF managed rule groups simplify protecting applications against common, well known attack patterns? How does rate based rules in AWS WAF help mitigate application layer DDoS attacks and abusive traffic patterns? How does AWS WAF Bot Control help distinguish between legitimate automated traffic and malicious bots? How does AWS Shield Advanced provide cost protection and access to specialized DDoS response support during a major attack? How should an organization design a layered defense in depth strategy combining WAF, Shield, security groups, and network ACLs to protect a public facing application?
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What is AWS WAF and how does it protect web applications from common attacks?

Beginner

Answer

AWS WAF, or Web Application Firewall, lets you create rules that inspect incoming web requests to your CloudFront distribution, Application Load Balancer, or API Gateway, and block or allow traffic based on conditions you define, such as blocking requests containing SQL injection patterns or cross site scripting attempts, protecting your application at the network edge before malicious requests ever reach your actual backend servers.
aws wafv2 create-web-acl --name my-web-acl --scope REGIONAL --default-action Allow={} --rules file://waf-rules.json
Real-world example An e commerce website attaches AWS WAF rules to its Application Load Balancer that automatically block requests containing common SQL injection patterns, preventing attackers from exploiting vulnerabilities in the application's database queries.

Common follow-ups: What is the difference between AWS WAF's managed rule groups and custom rules?;Which AWS services can AWS WAF be attached to?

Amazon CloudFront & Content Delivery;Amazon API Gateway
All 7 AWS WAF & Shield questions